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Things Near 
and i ar 


BOOKS BY ARTHUR MACHEN 


THE HOUSE OF SOULS 
THE SECRET GLORY 
FAR OFF THINGS 
THE HILL OF DREAMS 
THINGS NEAR AND FAR 


In Preparation 
THE THREE IMPOSTORS 
THE LONDON ADVENTURE 


NEW YORK: ALFRED: A+ KNOPF 


‘Things 
Near and Far 


By Arthur Machen 


| New York 
Alfred - A+ Knopf 


Mcmxxili 


COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY 
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Ino. 


Published, February, 1923 


Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y. 
on Warren’s Number Sizty-siz paper. 
Bound by the H. Wolff Estate, New York. 


MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


Pihinos a, ; 
and F ar 


ee a 
MASSE 


tS SERS: 


“a os 
ee 


Eng lish 
Or . 

ou | 
ee) 
Sa 
Se) 
74 


Chapter I 


HE road from Newport to Caer- 
leon-on-Usk winds, as it. comes 
near to the old Roman, fabulous 
city, with the winding of the tawny river 
which I have always supposed must be 
somewhat of the colour of the Tiber. 
This road was made early in the nine- 
teenth century when stage-coaching came 
to perfection, for the old road between 
the two towns passed over the Roman 
bridge—blown down the river by a great 
storm in the  seventeen-nineties—and 
climbed the break-neck hill to Christ- 
church. Well, this new road as I re- 
member it was terraced, as it were, high 
above the Usk to the west, and above it 
to the east rose a vast wood, or what 
seemed a vast wood in 1870, called St. 
Julian’s Wood, of some fame as a ghostly 
place. It was cut down long ago by an 
owner who thought timber of high growth 
better than ghosts. 


ae | 


Things Near and Far 


On the one side, then, the steep dark 
ascent of St. Julian’s Wood; on the other, ~ 
the swift fall of the bank to the yellow 
river, where, likely enough, there would 
be a man in a coracle fishing for salmon. 
And then there came a certain turn, 
where suddenly one saw the long, great 
wall of the mountain in the west, and the 
high dome of Twyn Barlwm, a prehistoric 
tumulus; and down below, an island in the 
green meadows by the river, the little 
white Caerleon, shining in the sun. 
There is a grey wall on one side of it, a 
very old and mouldering wall to look at, 
and indeed it is old enough, for it is all 
that remains of the Roman wall of Isca 
Silurum, headquarters of the Second Au- 
custan Legion. 

But there, white in the sun of some 
summer afternoon of fifty years ago or 
so, Caerleon still stands for me shining, 
beautiful, a little white city in a dream, 
with the white road coming down the hill 
from Newport, down out of St. Julian’s 
Wood, and so to the level river meadows, 
and so winding in a curve and coming to 
the town over the bridge. 

That is my vision of the place where I 

8 


Things Near and Far 


was born; no doubt the recollection of 
driving home beside my father on some 
shining summer afternoon of long ago; 
but of later years another vision of the 
same white town and white road has come 
to me. I have ‘made this up,’ as the 
children say, though, no doubt, it is all 
true. The time now goes back from the 
early ’seventies to the early ‘fifties, and 
two young ladies are setting out from the 
Vicarage—it stood practically in the 
churchyard, pretty well in the position of 
that other, that illustrious Vicarage at 
Haworth, and my Aunt Maria could 
never see any reason why a vicarage 
should not be in a churchyard—the two 
young ladies closed the Vicarage door, 
and made their way down the deserted 
street, where the grass was green between 
the cobble-stones, and so passed over the 
bridge and into the Newport road. ‘They 
were going to meet John, home from 
Jesus College, Oxford; and no doubt they 
talked eagerly of how well John was do- 
ing at Oxford, and wondered when he 
would be ordained, and where his first 
curacy would be, and what a good clergy- 
man he would make, and how they hoped 


9 


Things Near and Far 


- he would marry somebody nice, and what 
a pity it was that John was not at home 
when Mr. Tennyson came to Caerleon 
and stayed at the Hanbury Arms, and 
smoked a black clay tobacco pipe with his 
feet on the mantelpiece; very odd, but 
poets always were odd people and “Airy 
Fairy Lilian” was very pretty. The 
Vicar had called of course, and had been 
a little shocked at the pipe; still, Papa was 
always so amiable and ready to make al- 
lowances. 

“Your grandfather,’ Aunt Maria said 
to me years afterwards, “was a most ami- 
able man, but he could not bear radishes 
or the Adeste fideles.” 

Well, the two young ladies, Anne and 
Maria, shading themselves from the heat 
of the sun with their fringed parasols, 
pace decorously along the Newport road 
discussing these and many other matters; 
parish matters, of helping poor people 
and old people and sick people; county 
matters, the great doings that there would 
be at the Park when Sir (?) Hanbury 
Leigh was to have a large party from 
London on August 12th to shoot grouse 
on the mountain; Church matters; how a 

IO 


Things Near and Far 


Mr. Leonard had just been given the liv- 
ing of Kemeys Commander and had actu- 
ally been heard to say, “I call myself a 
Catholic priest” and, in spite of the 
Creeds, wasn’t that going rather far? 
And what would John say to that? And, 
somehow, I fancy the talk came circling 
again and again back to John, and how 
glad he would be to be at home again, and 
how lucky it was that Mrs. Williams Pan- 
- tyreos had come in that very morning be- 
cause John always said that he never got 
- butter like the Pantyreos butter any- 
where, and how it was to be hoped that 
the weather would keep up till Wednesday 
when they were all going to drive to Aunt 
Mary’s at Abergavenny—except Mamma, 
who said, ‘“‘Young gadabout ne’er won a 
clout’—and how this beautiful sunshine 
must be doing Cousin Blanche’s cough a 
great deal of good: John would like to 
see Cousin Blanche again. 

And so on, and so on, and the two sis- 
ters walk along the white limestone road, 
picking a flower now and again, for Anne 
paints flowers and Maria is much inter- 
ested in Botany—I am not sure whether 
she had acquired Miss Pratt’s three-vol- 

II 


Things Near and Far 


ume work on the subject at that date. 
And the evening draws along, and the sun 
hangs over the huge round of Mynydd 
Maen in the west, and the scents of St. 
Julian’s dark, deep wood fill the stilled 
air; till Maria says suddenly: ‘Anne! 
here is the omnibus at last, and, there! 
I believe I can see John’s face.” 

The old dim yellow and faded choco- 
late omnibus from the Bull—I remember 
it in its last days just before they made 
the line, and never will I speak of this 
omnibus as a ’bus—comes lumbering on 
its way; and the old driver, recognising 
the ‘‘two Miss Joneses the Vicarage” and 
knowing that Master John is inside, causes 
it to stop. John, a mild-looking young 
man with little side whiskers, gets out 
and kisses his sisters; and the three then 
get in, and the omnibus lumbers down the 
hill towards Caerleon, the three chatter- 
ing of Oxford, of plans and prospects, of 
(Caerleon news and how happy Papa 
looked at breakfast. And so the evening 
draws on and the shadows deepen and the 
walls of white Caerleon glimmer, and 
grow phantasmal like the old grey Roman 
wall as they cross the bridge and the Usk 

12 


Things Near and Far 


swims to high tide, the tawny yellow tinged 
with something of the sunset redness that 
glows over the mountain. The three are 
talking and chattering all the while, mak- 
ing plans for holidays and happiness and 
long bright years and the joy of life—a 
correct joy, but still joy—before them, 
and John is enquiring eagerly after Cousin | 
Blanche and nodding and smiling to the 
_ Bluecoat boys and girls and saying: “Ill 
unpack my box to-night and show you my 
prizes—Parker’s ‘Gothic Architecture,’ in 
three volumes and Hooker and a lot 
more,” and they are hoping again and 
again that Wednesday will be fine, and 
Blanche is sure to be quite well by this, 
and John is feeling his young cheeks grow 
a little red when—it is night. 

Alas! They are all ‘dead, years and 
years ago. The kind Vicar and his grim, 
good wife are dead. Poor Cousin Blanche 
perished of consumption in her fresh 
youth; no summer sun could allay the 
racking of that cough of hers. Anne fol- 
lowed her, by the same way to the same 
end: I have the “Holy Dying” that John, 
my father, gave her. There are two in- 
scriptions in it; one facing the rubricated 


r3 


Things Near and Far 


title-page, now ‘‘foxed” with time. This 
runs: 
To Anne E. Jones 
from her affectionate 
Brother John Edward 
On her Birthday, and in 
remembrance of the 29th 
September, 1857 1 
April 16th, 1858. 


The other, on the recto of the leaf, is 
as follows: 


Johannes Edvardus Jones, 
In memoriam A.E.J.J. 
Quz obdormivit in Jesu 

29 mo Martii MDCCCLIX 


And those of the party that lived longer 
knew more of sorrow, and more of broken 
hopes and dreams that never came true. 
And thus, advisedly, I begin this second 
chapter in the story of a young man’s 
dreams and hopes and adventures. Ego 
quoque—I am forgetting my Latin tags 
—I, too, have walked on the white road 
to Caerleon. 


To walk a little faster, to comply, in 


1 The date, I think, of their father’s death. 
14 


Things Near and Far 


fact, with the request of the whiting in 
Lewis Carroll’s beautiful Idyll, the end of 
1884 and the beginning of 1885 found me 
in something of a backwater. ‘The An- 
atomy of Tobacco,” the book I had writ- 
ten in the 10 by 6 cell in Clarendon Road, 
Notting Hill Gate, had been published in 
the autumn of 1884, and soon after I had 
set about the translating of the ‘Hepta- 
meron.” Every evening I worked at this 
task till it was ended; and now it was done, 
and there seemed nothing to do next. I 
wandered up and down the county about 
Llanddewi Rectory in my old way, lost 
myself in networks of deep lanes, coming 
out of them to view woods that were 
strange and the prospect of hills that 
guarded undiscovered lands. ‘Thus on 
my wider and more prolonged travels, 
but I had haunts near home, nooks and 
retreats where nobody ever came. ‘There 
was an unfrequented lane, very dark, very 
deep, that led from a hamlet called Com- 
mon Cefn Llwyn—the Ridge of the Grove 
—to Llanfrechfa, used scarcely at all save 
by labouring men going to their work in 
the early morning and returning in the 
evening. All the length of this lane there 


1) 


Things Near and Far 


was only one house in sight—the farms in 
Gwent are mostly in the heart of the fields, 
remote even from the byways—and this 
one house must have fallen into ruin 
eighty or a hundred years ago. From 
what remained one judged that it had been 
the petit manoir of some dead and for- 
gotten race of little squires; it was of grey 
stone, of fifteenth-century workmanship, 
and the corbels supporting the chimney 
were still sound and clean cut. All about 
the old broken house were the ruins of the 
garden, apple trees and plum trees run 
wild, hedges that had become brakes, a 
confusion of degenerate flowers; and by 
the tumbledown stile that led to this 
deserted place I would linger for an hour 
or more, wondering and dreaming and 
setting my heart on the hopeless endea- 
vour of letters. Weather made no dif- 
ference to my goings; a heavy greatcoat, 
boots with soles an inch thick, and leather 
gaiters up to the knee, made a wild wet 
winter’s day a thing to be defied and en- 
joyed; and indeed I loved to get abroad on 
such days and see all the wells of the hills 
overflowing and rushing down to swell 
the Soar or the Canthwr, red and foam- 
16 


Things Near and Far 


ing, and making whirlpools of barmy froth 
as they fell into the brooks. And then, 
when the rain changed to snow, what a 
delight to stand on some high, lonely 
place and look out on the wide, white land, 
and on the hills where the dark pines stood 
in a ring about some ancient farm: to see 
the wonder of the icy sunlight, of the vio- 
let winter sky. These were my great 
adventures, and I know not whether in 
reality there are any greater, since it is 
a great thing to stand on the very verges 
of an unknown world. 

So the winter of ’84-85 went on and I 
dreamed and wondered and did nothing, 
though I was nearing the age at which 
many a young man has produced his first 
novel with success and acclaim. I never 
could do these things, and still I cannot 
do them. I knew that I had no business 
to be loafing and mooning about the rec- 
tory, a burden on my poor father—the 
“John” of that happy return of the ’fifties 
had by this time experienced sorrows and 
pains and miseries of all sorts. My 
mother had been a hopeless invalid for 
fifteen years, my father’s health had failed 
and he had become very deaf, the poor 


17 


Things Near and Far 


“living” of Llanddewi Fach had grown 
poorer still through the agricultural smash 
of 1880, he was in dire and perpetual 
straits for money, he underwent most of 
the mortifications which are allotted to 
the poor. It makes me grieve to this 
day to remember with what piteous sad- 
ness he would lean his head on his hand; 
he had lost hope; nothing had any savour 
for him any more. And seeing this, I was 
distressed to be an additional weight in the 
heavy pack of sorrows and trials that he 
bore daily, and I tried to get all sorts of 
employments for which I was utterly unfit, 
which would not have harboured me for 
twenty-four hours. Nothing came of 
these attempts, and so the time went on 
till we were in June, 1885. ‘Then there 
was a letter from the fublisher of “The 
Anatomy of Tobacco”’ to the effect that he’ 
thought he could find me some odd jobs of 
work if I would come up to London; and 
so I returned again to the well-remem- 
bered cell in Clarendon Road. 

With mixed feelings. I was glad in- 
deed at the prospect of doing something 
for myself and so removing a little from 
the weary burden at the rectory: but, I 

18 


Things Near and Far 


had not forgotten the peine forte et dure; 
the dry bread, enough and no more than 
enough, the water from a bitter runnel 
of a sorrowful street, the heavy weight 
of perpetual loneliness. ‘Alone in Lon- 
don” has become a phrase, it is a title as- 
sociated, I think, with some flaring melo- 
drama; but the reality is a deadly thing. 
I was only twenty-two; and I shuddered 
a little one June night when I went out and 
bade farewell to the brooks and the woods 
and the flowers; to the scent of the eve- 
ning air. 

All sorts of odd jobs and queer jobs 
awaited me. I was given a big folio 
book full of cuttings on a particular sub- 
ject, and the publisher asked me to make 
a selection from these and so compile a 
book of oddments. Then, there were 
novels submitted to him that I was to 
read and advise upon: a weary business 
when the said novels were as a rule fool- 
ish things written in varieties of straggly 
and scraggy scripts. But the principal 
business was the making of the Catalogue. 
For the publisher of York Street was also 
a second-hand bookseller. He'hada mass 
of odd literature stored in a garret in 


19 


Things Near and Far 


Catherine Street, and on these volumes I 
was let loose; my main business being to 
write notes under the titles, notes describ- 
ing the contents of the books and setting 
that content in an alluring manner before 
the collector. 

It was as odd a library as any man could 
desire to see. Occultism in one sense or 
another was the subject of more of the 
books. ‘There were the principal and the 
most obscure treatises on Alchemy or 
Astrology, on Magic; old Latin volumes 
most of them. Here were books about 
Witchcraft, Diabolical Possession, ‘‘Fas- 
cination,”’ or the Evil Eye; here comments 
on the Kabbala. Ghosts and Apparitions 
were a large family, Secret Socteties of 
all sorts hung on the skirts of the Rosi- 
crucians and Freemasons, and so found 
a place in the collection. Then the semi- 
religious, semi-occult, semi-philosophical 
sects and schools were represented: we 
dealt in Gnostics and Mithraists, we har- 
boured the Neoplatonists, we conversed 
with the Quitetists and the Swedenbor- 
gians. ‘These were the ancients; and be- 
side them were the modern throng of 
Diviners and Stargazers and Psychome- 

20 


Things Near and Far 


trists and Animal Magnetists and Mes- 
merists and Spiritualists and Psychic Re- 
searchers. In a word, the collection in 
the Catherine Street garret represented 
thoroughly enough that inclination of the 
human mind which may be a survival 
from the rites of the black swamp and the 
cave or—an anticipation of a wisdom and 
knowledge that are to come, transcending 
all the science of our day. 

Which? It seems to me a vast ques- 
tion, and I am sure it is utterly insoluble. 
Of course, an enormous mass of occult- 
ism, ancient and modern, may be brushed 
aside at once without the labour of any 
curious investigation. Madame Blavat- 
sky, for example, her coadjutors and asses- 
sors and successors need not detain us. 
I do not mean that every pronouncement 
of Theosophy is false or fraudulent. A 
liar is not to be defined as a man who never 
by any chance speaks the truth. A thief 
occasionally comes honestly by what he 
has. I mean that the specific doctrines 
and circumstances of Theosophy: the Ma- 
hatma stories, the saucers that fell from 
the ceiling, the vases that were found 
mysteriously reposing in empty cupboards, 

2I 


Things Near and Far 


the Messiahship of a gentleman whose _ 
name I choose to forget: all this is rub- 
bish, not worth a moment’s consideration. 
And so with Spiritualism; though in a 
less degree. For I am strongly inclined 
to believe that very odd things do some- 
times happen amongst those who ‘“‘sit,”’ 
that some queer-—and probably undesir- 
able—psychic region is entered; and all 
this quite beyond and beside the intention 
or understanding of those present at the 
séance. You never know what may hap- 
pen when a small boy pokes his fingers 
carelessly among the wheels and works of 
a clock. But as to the profession of the 
Spiritualists; that they are able to com- 
municate with ghosts, that need not trouble 
us. Their photographs of fairies need 
not trouble us. Their revelations as to 
the life of the world to come as given 
through the Rev. Vale Owen need not 
trouble us. Though here is a ‘“‘phenom- 
enon” which seems to me of no little 
interest. How can a man who is con- 
fessedly perfectly honest and straightfor- 
ward conjure himself into the belief that 
when he takes up a pencil an intelligence 
apart from himself guides his hand as he 
22 


Things Near and Far 


writes? I suppose the answer involves 
the doctrine of dual or multiple person- 
ality; and that is mysterious enough in all 
conscience. Yet, apart from all the non- 
sense, apart from the state of mind of 
the average Spiritualist—one of them, a 
very eminent one in his day, said that the 
clause of the Creed: “I look for the Resur- 
rection of the Dead’? meant ‘‘I expect to 
see some physical manifestations of the 
departed”—apart from all this I still 
think as I have said that very strange and 
inexplicable things do sometimes happen. 
Here is nothing to do with ghosts: but 
the evidence that the famous medium 
Home rose into the air, floated out of an 
open window high on a Scottish castle 
tower and floated in again at another 
open window: the evidence here is good; 
that is, if levitation, as they call it, were 
a criminal offence and Home had been 
put on his trial he would have been con- 
victed. It will be seen that I am not 
exactly a fanatical Spiritualist: but I had 
rather be of the straightest sect of Rappers 
and Banjo Wielders than of that company 
which understands all the whole frame 
and scheme of the universe so thoroughly 


Ag 


Things Near and Far 


and completely that it is absolutely certain 
that levitation is impossible, that a man 
cannot rise into the air unless he is me- 
chanically and materially impelled and sup- 
ported, that no evidence, however direct 
and unimpeachable, can establish this for 
a fact. I do not understand the universe; 
consequently I do not dare to advance any 
such proposition. And further; let me 
diminish a little a proposition that I have 
only just dared to make. I have said 
that all the ghost business, all the Vale 
Owen sort of business, is rubbish and 
foolery. Well, I believe most heartily 
and profoundly that it is rubbish, non- 
sense, unveridical to the last degree; in 
fact, and in the proper sense of the word, 
a lie. Yet; let us beware. Not one of 
us understands the universe. Even in the 
Higher Mathematics, the Queen of pro- 
fane sciences, very odd things are reported 
to happen. So, possibly, the following ac- 
count may really correspond with the 
truth of things. 

The room is in total darkness. One 
of the sitters proclaims with exultation 
that his nose has been tweaked by Joey, 
who, on this side, was a clown. John 


24 


Things Near and Far 


King, understood to have been a master- 
mariner, sings “Tom Bowling” in a fal- 
setto voice through a speaking trumpet. 
On this Cardinal Newman, known to be 
a lover of music, is gratified and utters 
the word ‘Benedictine.’ There is a 
sudden scream of joy in a female voice: 
“Oh! darling Katy, thank you, thank you, 
thank you! Oh, please, may we have the 
lights turned up for a moment? Katy 
promised me a lock of her beautiful golden 
hair, and I am sure I felt it float down 
on my hand.” ‘The lights are turned up. 
A strand of yellow hair is, sure enough, 
reposing on the lady’s hand. It had evi- 
dently been treated with spiritual peroxide, © 
made, no doubt, of Ethers, like the ghostly 
whiskey and sodas in “‘Raymond.” ‘Then 
the room is darkened and the Medium 
takes up the tale. 

‘This spirit’s name is Milton. Henry 
-—no, John Milton, the author of the 
‘Faery Queen.’ He says that he is very 
happy. He spends most of his time with 
Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Shakes- 
peare has confessed to him that all his 
plays were written by Bacon. The evi- 
dence will be found in a brass box under 


a 


Things Near and Far 


the Tube station at Liverpool Street. 
Pope often has tea with him. He says 
they don’t use alcohol there.”’ 

There is a sudden crash. ‘‘Avast!” 
comes with a roar through the trumpet. 
John King has returned, bringing with 
him an American Indian who speaks in 
the idiom of a Nigger Minstrel practis- 
ing in the East End of London and will 
call the Medium his “Midi.” Where- 
upon Katy puts a beautiful warm arm 
round the neck of a gentleman sitter and 
the gramophone plays “Abide with me.” 
All repeat the Lord’s Prayer, and Sir 
Arthur 'Conan Doyle expresses his intense 
gratification. 

Well; it may be so. But I hope it isn’t, 
and I shall never believe that it is so. 

Well; there I laboured in the Catherine 
Street garret amidst all this, and much 
more than this. Down below were the 
publishing offices of old Mr. Vizetelly, 
who was issuing English translations of 
Zola at the time, and was at last sent to 
gaol for publishing an English version of 
‘La Terre,” an obscene book that every 
judicious Bishop of Central France should 
put in the hands of newly ordained priests 


26 


Things Near and Far 


—if it is to be accepted that the physician 
ought to have some knowledge of the con- 
stitutions of his patients and of the dis- 
eases from which they are suffering. It 
was a sumptuous and rich garret—a street 
now passes over the site of the house— 
filled with that mysterious odour that used 
to prevail in oldish London houses that 
were not too carefully swept and washed 
and polished, and there day after day I 
worked, reading and annotating, and all 
alone. Now and then in the older books 
I came across striking sentences. ‘There 
was Oswaldus Crollius, for example—l 
suppose his real name was Osvald Kroll— 
who is quoted by one of the characters in 
“The Great God Pan.” “In every grain 
of wheat,” says Oswaldus) “there lies 
hidden the soul of a Star.” A wonderful 
saying; a declaration, I suppose, that all 
matter is one, manifested under many 
forms; and, so far as I can gather, modern 
science is rapidly coming round to the 
view of this obscure speculator of the 
seventeenth century; and, in fact, to the 
doctrine of the alchemists. But I would 
advise any curious person who desires to 
investigate this singular chamber of the 


=} 


Things Near and Far 


human mind to beware of over-thorough- 
ness. Let him dip lightly from the vellum 
quarto into the leather duodecimo, glanc- 
ing at a chapter here, a sentence there; 
but let him avoid all deep and systematic 
study of Crollius and of Vaughan, the 
brother of the Silurist, and of all their 
tribe. For if you go too far you will be 
disenchanted. ‘Open Robert Fludd, other- 
wise Robertus de Fluctibus, and find the 
sentence: Transmutemini, transmutemini 
de lapidibus mortuis in lapides philosoph- 
icos vivos—Be ye changed, be ye changed 
from dead stones into living and life-giving 
stones. ‘This is a great word indeed, 
exalted and exultant; but beware of mas- 
tering Fludd’s system—if confusion can 
be called a system—of muddled alchemy, 
physical science, metaphysics and mysti- 
cism. Get Knorr von Rosenroth’s ‘‘Kab- 
bala Denudata,”’ vellum, in quarto, and 
find out a little about the Sephiroth: about 
Kether, the Crown; Tiphereth, Beauty; 
Gedulah, Mercy; Geburah, Justice or Se- 
verity. Really, you will discover very 
curious things, and the more easily, if in- 
stead of Knorr von Rosenroth, you choose 
A. E. Waite’s “Doctrine and Literature of 
28 


Things Near and Far 


the Kabalah.” It is odd, for example, to 
discover that the side of Mercy is the mas- 
culine side, that Justice or Severity is 
feminine; and that all will go amiss till 
these two are united in Benignity. Again, 
it is interesting from another point of 
view to discover that three of the Seph- 
iroth are called the Kingdom, the Vic- 
tory and the Glory. Is there any con- 
nection between these and the ancient litur- 
gical response to the Pater Noster: “For 
Thine is the Kingdom, the Power and 
the Glory’? And then that matter of 
Lilith and Samael and the Shells or 
Cortices, the husks of spirits from a 
ruined world that brought about the Fall 
of Man; the strange mystery of that place 
‘which is called Zion and Jerusalem’— 
duly here comparing Bohme on the Re- 
covery of Paradise when innocent man 
and maid are joined in love—all this is a 
wonderful and fascinating region of 
thought. And beautiful indeed is the say- 
ing of one of the Fathers of Kabbalism: 
that when the lost Letters of Tetragram- 
maton, the Divine Name, are found there 
shall be mercy on every side. And here, ~ 
perhaps, but not certainly, light may be 


29 


Things Near and Far 


thrown on certain obscure matters of Free- 
masonry. Dip then, and read and wander 
in the Kabbala; but do not become a Kab- 
balist. For if you do, you will end by 
transliterating your name and the names 
of your friends into Hebrew letters and 
finding out all sorts of marvellous things, 
till at last you back Winners—which turn 
out to be Losers—on purely Kabbalistic 
principles. 

And here, by the way, I may remark 
that I have long meditated writing an 
article called ‘“The Aryan Kabbala,” keep- 
ing the requirements of occult magazines 
strictly in view. It would make a pretty 
article. I should begin by a brief note 
on the Hebrew Kabbala, explaining how 
the Sephiroth tell in a kind of magic short- 
hand the whole history and mystery of 
man and all the worlds from their source 
to their end. The Tree of Life—as the 
Sephiroth arranged in a certain scheme 
are called—is, in fact, I would point out, 
at once an account of how all things came 
into being and a map and an analysis of 
all things as they now are. As an occult 
friend once said to me by my hearth in 


Gray's Inn: “The Tree of Life can be 
30 


Things Near and Far 


applied to that poker.” The Tree of 
Life, then, is a key to the secret genera- 
tion and being of all souls and all heavens; 
it will also analyse for you the little flower 
growing in a cranny of the wall. 

Well; this made clear, I would go on 
to say: “But what if there be a Kabbala 
and a Tree of Life of the Aryans as well 
as of the Semites? What if it tells all 
the hidden secrets of our beginning and 
‘our journey and our ending? What if 
its august symbols are known to all of us, 
in everyday and common use amongst 
us, remaining all the while as undiscerned 
as the most sacred and mystic hiero- 
glyphics? What if the office boy and the 
grocer handle every day the signs which 
telly Lheroecretiof Secrets | 

And then, after all due amplifications 
and ponderous circumnavigations it would 
all come out. ‘The Aryan Kabbala is, 
in fact, the Decad; the ten first numbers. 
They embody an age-old tradition dating 
from the time when the ancestors of the 
Greek and the Welshman, the Persian and 
the Teuton were all one people. They 
contained the secret mystery religion of 
this primitive race, they sank by degrees 


31 


Things Near and Far 


from their first august significance to be- 
come instruments of common use and com- 
mercial convenience, just as vestments be- 
came clothes. The proof is easy enough. 
Take the first number of the Decad: one 
in English, & (in the neuter) in Greek, 
unus in Latin, Un (pronounced “een’’) 
in Welsh, ein in German. And then 
compare another series of words in these 
languages: wine, olyos; Vinum, gwin, wein. 
Then: two, vo, duo, dau, zwei; and 
compare with: water iéwp, udus, wy (and 
dwr) wasser. I drop the other terms, or 
Sephiroth, of the Decad—in Mrs. Boffin’s 
presence—and come to the last two 
numerals: nine, éwéa, novem, naw, neun, 
compared with new, véos, novus, newydd, 
neu. Then finally ten, 8exa, decem, deg, 
zehn: compare with deck el Sofa, 
decor, teg, schon. 

The conclusion, I hope, is evident: we 
(and all things) proceed from Unity, 
which is wine, decline to Duality (or a 
weakened, fallen nature), which is water. 
Then, after passing through many changes, 
adventures, transformations, transmuta- 
tions—undescribed for the reason given— 
we are renovated, made New—“I will 


32 


Things Near and Far 


make all things new’’—in the last number 
but one of the Decad, and, in the final 
term, which is Ten, are reunified in Beauty 
and Glory. 

There! It seems to me wonderfully 
plausible, and I really think I should 
have written the article and sent it to 
some suitable quarter. It is all nonsense, 
of course, but . .. does that matter? 


Well, all that business of the Aryan 
Kabbala is an absurd digression, but it 
illustrates well enough the frame of mind 
likely to be induced by the study of a good 
many of the books in the Catherine Street 
garret. ake the interlude and add to it 
the rich odours of the frowsy, neglected 
room stuffed with confusions of old books 
and pamphlets, add to it the old, delight- 
ful, picturesque London that was undis- 
turbed in those days. Holywell Street 
and Wych Street were all in their glory in 
1885, a glory compounded of sixteenth- 
century gables, bawdy books and matters 
congruous therewith, parchment Elzevirs, 
dark courts and archways, hidden taverns, 
and ancient slumminess. ‘There were no 
great, blatant Australia Houses or Colo- 


on 


Things Near and Far 


nial Edifices of any kind about the Strand 
in those times: instead, we had the beauty 
and the green lawns of Clement’s Inn and 
the solemn square of New Inn, and Clare 
(Market communicating tortuously with 
Great Queen Street by the most evil- 
smelling byways that I have ever expe- 
rienced—and something of jollity in the 
air that seems to me to have vanished 
utterly. Take all these elements and 
things; and you have me as | worked high 
up in the vanished house in Catherine 
Street, preparing the Catalogue that was 
to be called: “The Literature of Occult- 
ism and Archeology’—when the gas 
lamps in the Strand shone with a brighter 
light than the arc lamps of to-day. 


3+ 


Chapter II 


UCH was the scene of my life in 
S the summer of the year 1885. By 

my odd jobs; a little ‘“‘reading,” a 
little compiling and a good deal of cata- 
logue making, I just managed to live, earn- 
ing perhaps as much as a pound a week, 
one week with another. I do not remem- 
ber exactly the precise terms on which I 
worked, but I know that I had a good deal 
of time on my hands. Part of this time 
I spent in trying to learn shorthand. IL 
can’t think why, for at this period of my 
life I had no newspaper or secretarial 
employment in view. I am inclined to 
think that trying to learn shorthand had 
become a mechanical habit with me. 
Then, I resumed my old mooning walks 
out of London, going westward usually or 
always, sometimes Acton way and some- 
times through Brentford—that curious, 
dirty, and most fascinating place—to Os- 
terley Park, where in those days you could 


i) 


Things Near and Far 


walk and wander anywhere you pleased, 
so long, I suppose, as you did not glue 
your nose to the windows of that man- 
sion. And then I fell to writing again. 
Now here is a mystery. It is held, 
and very properly, that people should 
keep their mouths shut unless they have 
something to say; similarly that a man 
has no business to write unless he has 
something in his heart which, he feels, 
cries out to be expressed. But here was 
I not knowing in the least what I wanted 
to say, but resolved, even at the cost of 
much pain and misery, to say it; that is, 
to write it. There are, of course, people 
who are said to talk for talking’s sake; 
and so, I suppose, I was suffering from 
the analogous vice of writing for writing’s 
sake, otherwise known as the cacoethes 
scribendi. I fancy a volume of Hazlitt 
had fallen into my hands; it had strayed, 
very likely, into the Catherine Street li- 
brary, and at first I began to try to write 
essays, more or less in imitation of this 
inimitable author. I need scarcely say 
that | made sad work of it; and happily, 
no scrap of manuscript survives. And 
then I fell on Rabelais and on Balzac’s 


36 


Things Near and Far 


b) 


“Contes Drolatiques,” and wondered and 
admired hugely and studied both deeply 
in my long night watches under the gas- 
jet in the little room in Clarendon Road. 
I would dine sumptuously on half a loaf 
of dry bread, green tea made as [| liked 
it, without milk or sugar, with plenty of 
tobacco by way of dessert; and then to my 
books and to my wonder: It was not a 
bad life on the whole, sweetened as it was 
by the enthusiasm for letters; but the 
loneliness was an oppression and some- 
times a horror. Weeks passed without 
any human converse beyond brief business 
dialogue; still, since then I have known 
far worse days. Poverty and loneliness; 
these are doubtless evils hard to bear; 
but they are light indeed; nay, they have 
their dignity, and the gas-jet of Clarendon 
Road is not altogether without a halo— 
when I weigh all this and set it in the bal- 
ances beside the intolerable degradation 
of the service of Carmelite House. I 
often thought in those latter and most 
hideous days that my case was somewhat 
that of a man who had been captured by 
a malignant tribe of anthropoid apes or 
Yahoos and was by them tormented and 


oh 


Things Near and Far 


unspeakably degraded; and there was this 
additional shame and horror: that my deg- 
radation and misery were witnessed by 
rational creatures like myself. I remem- 
ber how in my last year in the employment 
of “The Evening News,’ I was out on 
some idiotic errand which led me up Wel- 
lington Street, past York Street, where 
George Redway, the publisher of “The 
Anatomy of Tobacco” and of “The Liter- 
ature of Occultism and Archeology,” had 
his place of business. In a line, pretty 
well, with York Street I could see that 
new street which runs over the site of Old 
Vizetelly’s office where the famous fusty 
garret was. The  streets—Wellington 
Street, Bow Street, York Street—are not 
much changed in the last forty years, and 
the gap formed by the new street made 
me see myself a cloudy young man of 
twenty-two up in the air labouring 
amongst the dusty ancient books; all this 
and all the recollections of the days of 
dry bread, tea, tobacco and the hopeless 
but not dishonourable endeavour of liter- 
ature; all this contrasted with the shame- 
ful circumstances of my life as a weary old 
man of fifty-eight, a man who had known 


38 


Things Near and Far 


struggles and sorrows and losses; all this, 
I say, overwhelmed me suddenly. It was 
almost more than I could endure. 

But we go too fast. We are still in the 
days of the cloudy young man, who is 
clear that fine literature is an infinitely 
noble thing, but is not clear upon any 
other subject whatever. I had my queer 
books in the mornings and my long lonely 
walks in the afternoons, and my great 
books in the evening and far into the 
night. I remember reading Dante in 
Longfellow’s translation, from beginning 
to end, and though I could not by any man- 
ner of means lift up my heart and mind to 
the mountain-peak of the Paradise, I di- 
vined the majesty I could not comprehend. 
Don Quixote was always with me, and 
good company and meat and drink and 
lights and fire always to me; and so I 
pass along the dim London streets revolv- 
ing all these mighty works, a ghostly man 
amidst the hurrying multitude of the liv- 
ing, and go far afield under dim trees in 
the West, or sit solitary on a bench 
near the river in Kew Gardens, looking 
towards Syon; all the while in a lonely but 
not an unhappy dream. 


39 


Things Near and Far 


It came suddenly to me one night. I 
was lying awake in my bed; and then it 
came to me that I would write a Great 
Romance. A Great Romance! I know 
it is funny; but it is sorry too. I didn’t 
in the least know what the said Great 
Romance was to be about; save this, that 
Rabelais was to have something to do with 
it, and that my own county, beloved 
Gwent, was to have much more to do with 
it. That does not sound very definite; 
but I believe it is more definite than the 
actual vision which appeared to me, for 
this was rather a warm and golden and 
wonderful glow and radiance than any 
scheme for a book. I know I lay happy 
and trembling for a long time and fell 
asleep happy and awoke happy in the 
morning, and went out forthwith to buy 
pens and paper. I had both already, but 
I felt that the occasion was more than a 
special one and called for very special 
purchases. So, at the stationer’s shop, 
near the Holland Park end of Clarendon 
Road, I got ruled quarto paper, and 
“Viaduct” pens, and two penholders, and 
I am pleased that I am writing all this 


40 


Things Near and Far 


with a surviving penholder of those two; 
a poor old thing chewed to a stump and 
battered grievously in its metallic parts. 
So here was paper, here were pens and 
penholders; and of course the rest was 
easy. 


There was only this little difficulty. 
The golden and glowing vision of the 
night, the announcing of the Great Ro- 
mance, declined to be more specific. It 
had no hints to give, it seemed, as to plot; 
it still veiled the subject of this wonderful 
book in the dimmest, most religious ob- 
scurity. The paper and the pens were 
ready; but ‘how to begin writing the first 
line? I had not the faintest notion, so 
I proceeded to write Prologues and Epi- 
logues, with commentaries on the magnum 
opus which was not even begun. ‘Two 
of these oddities survive, the Dedication 
to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, as the 
Patron of men of letters; a dreadful quip 
founded on the old saying about “dining 
with Duke Humphrey,” which meant that 
you had not had any dinner. This was 
worked out with all elaboration and with 


41 


Things Near and Far 


an attempt at the great manner of Bacon 
in his most magistral mood. It ran in 
this vein: 


Truly, then, do we poor folk (men 
of letters) owe what service we are 
able to pay Your Grace, who in spite 
of mean dress and poverty (justly 
accounted by Mr. Hobbes for shame 
and dishonour) is pleased to entertain 
us at that board, where so great a mul- 
titude of our brotherhood has feasted 
before. For your illustrious line hath 
now for many generations made it a 
peculiar glory to supply the needs of 
lettered men; and as we sit at meat it 
seems (methinks) as if these mighty 
men of old did sit beside us and taste 
with us once more the mingled cup we 
drink. The ingenious author of Don 
Quixote de la Mancha must, I suppose, 
have often dined with the Duke of his 
age, Mr. Peter Corneille and Mr. Ot- 
way, Senhor Camoens, Rare Old Ben, 
Signori Tasso and Ariosto not seldom: 
while young Mr. Chatterton the poet 
did not only dine, but break his fast, 
take his morning draught, and sup with 


42 


Things Near and Far 
Your Grace’s great-grandfather, till at 
last he died of a mere repletion. 


There! Very solemn and portentous 
fun, indeed; but what is so solemn as a 
youngster of twenty-two? Canterbury 
Cathedral and Westminster Abbey seem 
gay and light and airy by comparison. J 
like it still, to be sure; but then I am prej- 
udiced, and indeed, there is one sentence 
that still affects me; that phrase about 
‘the mighty men of old’ who seem “‘to 
sit beside us and taste with us once more 
the mingled cup we drink.” For in that 
sentence I see something of the spirit 
which sustained me, the cloudy young 
man, the dreamy and obscure and inarticu- 
late young man, of those long-ago days, all 
through the fire and the darkness of pov- 
erty and loneliness and weariness and dis- 
illusion. Let us still, if you please, ride 
the high horse and be as magnificent as 
we can: I saw myself and, to be frank, I 
still see myself, as the youngest novice in 
a great and noble monastic house. The 
novice is by no means a promising member 
of the congregation, the Abbot and the 
Prior and the Master of the Novices have 


43 


Things Near and Far 


the gravest doubts as to his vocation: the 
other novices are inclined to indulge in 
remarks of a jocular and contemptuous 
kind. But the little, obscure and despised 
candidate for the triple cord sits in his 
low place at the board and looks at the 
pictures on the walls: on the faces where 
torment and exultation shine with twin 
fires: on Blessed Bernardus a Baculo, who 
was beaten to death by the Danes in the 
ninth century, on the Venerable Servant 
of God, Marcellinus, who was impaled by 
the Turk, on St. Eugenius de Compos- 
tella, who was shut by the Moors in a 
horrible dungeon of filth for forty years 
and at last his visage shone and gave light 
to the tormentors when they came to end 
him, on Venerable Raymondus Anglus, 
who was slowly sliced into little pieces in 
Cathay, on Blessed Gregory Perrott, 
whom the ministers of the Virgin Queen 
attended to at Tyburn in 1590: on all 
these brilliant successes of the convent 
does the little novice gaze with admiring 
wonder. Well he knows that his picture 
will never hang on the wall; still, and 
after all, he is a member of the congrega- 
tion to which these, the lucky and happy, 


44 


Things Near and Far 


belonged; in a faint sort they are his 
brothers; they are commensales, coher- 
edes, et sodales. 

Very fine, indeed; but in the meantime 
I am scratching with a somewhat hopeless 
pen under Clarendon Road gaslight, tak- 
ing difficulties for solution to lonely places 
such as Perivale, to the unfrequented 
parts of Hampton Court; or else, by con- 
trast, to the long black High Street of 
Brentford, with its creeks and backwaters 
of the river, where grass and flowers grow 
on the decks of derelict barges. I find 
no oracles to help me in any of these 
promising quarters; there are some very 
sad nights in the little room over the dry 
bread, tea and tobacco and the helpless 
pen. Finally, in a kind of despair, I be- 
gin something of which the first scene is 
to be laid in Gwent, which, later, is to 
have a voyage in it—there is a great voy- 
age in Rabelais to the Oracle of the Holy 
Bottle. I read the first chapter. It is 
quite hopeless; and yet I do not give up 
hope; I resolve to try again. 


But all this time, while the Great Ro- 
mance refused to move, my worldly affairs 


45 


* 


Things Near and Far 


were moving fast, and decidedly in the 
way of destruction. I suppose, having 
finished the Catalogue, I had done all that 
the publisher wanted of me. At all 
events, the stream of employment, never 
auriferous to any great extent, dwindled 
and dried up. I had a little, a very little 
money in hand, I could not possibly call 
on those poor people at home for help: 
my landlady in Clarendon Road had a 
hard struggle of it, I fancy, and I would 
not cadge on her kindness, even though 
my board and lodging were far from 
being luxurious. It seemed to me that at 
the end of the week I must just walk out 
of 23 Clarendon Road and go on walking 
towards the West till I couldn’t walk any 
longer. I admit that the plan was vague, 
as vague as the plot of the Great Ro- 
mance, but I could think of no other. 
And in the meantime—I had three or 
four days before me—I would write the 
Epilogue for my book: which was not yet 
begun. 

I set about this task with the utmost 
relish and enjoyment. For once, I knew 
what to write about; that was my own 


46 


Things Near and Far 


position; not in a plain and literal manner, 
but after the fashion of a decorated fan- 
tasy. It would never do to say: “Here 
am I, a stupid lad who is not worth two- 
pence to anybody, who thinks he can writs 
and can hardly get half a dozen words to 
stagger on the paper; here am I going 
out to die in a ditch or to live in a ward 
of the workhouse”: that would never 
have served. I agree with Mr. Sampson 
Brass in holding that the truth is 
often highly unpleasant and inconvenient, 
Hence the Epilogue to the unwritten 
book, which survives in the written book, 
“The Chronicle of Clemendy,’’ a work 
which is neither great nor a romance, but 
which answers the description admirably 
in all other respects. And as the Dedi- 
cation was made to Humphrey Duke of 
Gloucester, so the Epilogue is concerned 
with the same nobleman. So here we 
are: 


A few days ago His Grace did take 
me aside into his cabinet, and looking 
kindly upon me (though some call him 
a stern and awful noble) said: ‘‘Why, 


47 


Things Near and Far 


Master Leolinus, you look but sickly, 
poor gentleman, poor gentleman, I pro- 
test you're but a shadow, do not yous 
Abbreviatures bring you in a goodly 
revenue?’ (Note the elegant refer- 
ence to my mysterious shorthand.) 
“Not so, Your Grace,”’ answered I, “‘to 
the present time I have abbreviated all 
in vain, and were it not for the hospi- 
tality of your table, I know not how I 


should win through.” “How goes it 
then with your Silurian Histories?’ 
(The Great Romance. ... “With 


them, may it please Your Grace, it fares 
excellently well, and this morning I 
have made an end of writing the First 
Journey, containing many agreeable his- 
tories and choice discourses.” “I be- 
lieve indeed it will be a rare book, fit 
to read to the monks of intern while 
they dine. But yet I will have you lay 
it aside a little, since I have a good 
piece of preferment for you, an office 
(or I mistake you), altogether to your 
taste. What say you, Master Scholar, 
to the Lordship of an Island and no 
less an Island than Farre Joyaunce in 


48 


Things Near and Far 


the Western Seas? How stand you 
thitherwards? Will you take ship 
presently?’ At hearing this, I was, as 
you may guess, half bewildered with 
sudden joy, that is apt to bring tears 
into the eyes of them that have toiled 
in many a weary struggle with adver- 
sity: I could but kneel and kiss His 
Grace’s hand, and say ‘My Lord.” 


Of course, the allusions to ‘First 
Journeys” and “Silurian Histories” were 
put in months later, when I had at length 
found out what my book was about; at 
the time, October, 1885, I had not written 
one word of it. So the Epilogue went 
on its mellifluous way, and thus ended: 


But here is my Paumier, with his 
parchments, to advise with me concern- 
ing a grant of Water Baylage to the 
Abbey of St. Michael, and also concern- 
ing the ceremonies observed in the is- 
land at Christmastide. He tells me 
that the voyage will surely be a rough 
and tempestuous one, but with the cap- 
tain of the Salutation there need be no 


oo 


Things Near and Far 


fear. And so farewell, till the anchor 
be dropped in the Sure Haven of Farre 
Joyaunce. 


And indeed, as I was writing the last 
page of the Epilogue, a letter came for 
me. I had written to Mr. Quaritch, stat- 
ing my experience in cataloguing, and 
asking for employment. Mr. Quaritch 
wrote very civilly stating that he did not 
want any cataloguers, but people who 
knew how to sell books. And I wrote on 
to my final flourish, with all the more 
relish. ‘Ceremonies observed in the is- 
land at Christmastide,’’ indeed! Cere- 
monies observed at Reading Workhouse, 
more likely! 

But the next morning came a letter 
from Aunt Maria, that Maria who had 
walked with Anne to meet John on the 
white Caerleon road. My mother was 
dying; and they sent me the money for 
the fare, that I might come home. 


50 


Chapter III 


T is a debatable point, I suppose, 
| whether life, taking it all round, by 
and large, as Mr. Bixby said, is a 
horrible business. On the one hand, most 
of us are excessively sorry to quit this 
world, so, clearly, there must be some- 
thing to be said for it. But, on the other 
hand, how endless are the devices which 
we find to give a seasoning to a dish which 
is, perhaps, rather insipid than nauseous. 
I have eaten cold mutton with relish— 
after smothering it in about half a dozen 
different condiments, sauces, zests and 
salads. So look at all the games we play 
with desperate earnestness, with a vigour 
and delight and, sometimes, an asceticism 
which we give to no office routine or se- 
rious employment of our lives. Perhaps 
we may try and define what “‘life’’ means 
a little later; but, under all ordinary and 
respectable conventions, I presume that 
the business of which I have been dimly 


SI 


Things Near and Far 


aware on this day of writing can in no 
wise be classed as one of the serious em- 
ployments of life; as, in any sense, a vital 
part of life according to accepted doctrine, 
religious, scientific or philosophical. The 
business of which, I say, I have been dimly 
aware; for all I have seen of it has been 
Grove Road, Grove End Road, and Cir- 
cus Road and all the roads adjacent lined 
on both sides with motor cars of all sizes, 
splendours and miseries; the affair being 
the last day of the Oxford and Cambridge 
Cricket Match. And, looking at all this 
fairly, it comes to this: here are two wick- 
ets placed at a certain specified distance 
from one another on a stretch of turf, 
and here are men with bats and here are 
men with balls. Will the men with balls 
succeed in hitting the wickets, or will the 
men with bats succeed in hitting those 
balls away to remote parts of the turf? 
And on the whole: are the eleven young 
men of Oxford or the eleven young men 
of Cambridge the smarter and more 
skilled at these pursuits and in the sub- 
sidiary pursuit called ‘‘fielding,”’ or the 
art of stopping the ball which the man 
has hit with the bat from going to a re- 


§2 


Things Near and Far 


mote part of the stretch of turf? ‘That, 
in the very rough, is cricket; and I want 
to ask the clergy (if they have any time 
to spare from their self-appointed tasks 
of meddling in politics, ‘‘disapproving”’ of 
bookstall novels, and serving tables) what 
they honestly think Saint Paul would have 
said, if he had seen twenty-two of his most 

promising young converts engaged in this 
cricket business, applauded by a vast mul- 
titude of the saints? I desire to put this 
question not with a wish to ‘‘score’’—to 
use an idiom of the game which we are 
discussing—but with an honest longing 
for information. ‘That is: will theolo- 
gians maintain that the ’Varsity Match 
and First Class County Cricket generally 
is a part of serious life, or a serious part 
of life? Or, will the scientific people or 
the philosophical people declare that this 
game, played as it is played at Lord’s 
with desperate earnestness, is a necessary 
part of the bodily and mental well-being 
of the human race? I say the game as 
played at Lord’s, that is the great game; 
for the case of the old-fashioned, village 
cricket on the green was somewhat differ- 

ent. [hen you had a number of people 


53 


Things Near and Far 


with two or three hours of leisure before 
them who found a good deal of fun and 
relaxation and amusement in bowling 
balls and hitting balls and running after 
balls, with intervals of supping of ale, sit- 
ting on the bench under the shady tree 
in front of the village inn; this is a very 
different matter from the high cricket of 
our times, just as diverting yourself with 
a ball, a racket and a net is remote from 
Mlle. Lenglen’s game at lawn tennis. 
And these are the comparatively mild 
forms of sport. What of rowing till you 
are ‘blue in the face, what of climbing 
frightful mountain-peaks, with half an 
inch of rock between you and a fall of a 
thousand feet? Why do people do all 
these things, voluntarily, gladly, enthu- 
siastically? I can only suppose that they 
do these things to make life tolerable, 
even entertaining, just as I add tomato 
sauce, Worcester sauce, pickles, beetroot, 
cucumber and salad to the cold mutton, 
to make that tolerable and even appetis- 
ing. It would seem indeed that life must 
be an awful business, if you have to plas- 
ter yourself on the walls of a sheer 
Alp before you can endure it. This is 


54 


Things Near and Far 


“drowning” your cold mutton in strong 
sauce with a vengeance. 

And all this by way of a tentative ex- 
planation of why I ever wrote anything 
at all, and still more why I have gone on 
writing, with brief remissions, ever since 
the autumn of 1880. This problem, as 
I have hinted already, is a profound mys- 
tery. For, taking first the plain view of 
the man in the street, and applying his 
plain and simple test, I have just been 
running through a list of my books from 
1881 to 1922, and reckoning—it was an 
easy task—how much money I have made 
by them. The list contains eighteen 
titles. .Of these, the “Heptameron,’ 
‘Fantastic Tales,” ‘‘Casanova” represent 
more or less laborious translations—‘‘Cas- 
anova’? runs to twelve sizeable volumes. 
And my total receipts for these eighteen 
_volumes, for these forty-two years of toil, 
amount to the sum of six hundred and 
thirty-five pounds. ‘That is, I have been 
paid at the rate of fifteen pounds and a 
few shillings per annum. It seems clear, 
then, that my literary activities cannot be 
adequately accounted for on the hypothe- 
sis of mere greed and money-grubbing. 


35 


Things Near and Far 


And, then, taking another side of the 
question: consider the debit of toil and 
endeavour and mortification and disap- 
pointment that these forty-two years of 
book-writing have cost me. I believe 
that business men, engaged in manufac- 
ture, always ‘‘write off” a considerable sum 
for legitimate wear and tear and deprecia- 
tion of plant. What about the wear and 
tear of mind and heart and that T,e,a,r, 
which is pronounced in another manner; 
what about the depreciation of the plant 
—a highly important one—of self-con- 
fidence that my writing has inflicted on 
me? Ihave described some of the pains 
I endured when I set out to write 
the thing which afterwards became the 
“Chronicle of Clemendy,” and that was 
only the beginning of months of hard and 
agonizing labour. And then I remember 
another occasion. The ‘idea’ which 
turned into ‘The Great God Pan” came 
to me; again that delicious glow of de- 
light. Now at last I had got hold of a 
real notion; I had a curious tale, a rare 
fantasy set in a rarer atmosphere to work 
upon: I thrilled at my heart as the ex- 
plorer must thrill as he comes suddenly 


56 


Things Near and Far 


to the verge of the dark forest, or to the 
summit of the high mountain and sees be- 
fore him a new and wonderful and undis- 
covered land. Well I remember how all 
this exquisite bliss was bestowed on me, 
one dark and foggy afternoon of 1890-91, 
in rooms in Guilford Street, not far from 
“The Foundling.” The foul air shone 
bright, the dingy street, the dingy room 
were irradiated: here was happiness al- 
most too keen to be endured. With no 
delay I got notebook and pencil and pro- 
ceeded to “lay out” the story; that is, to 
set down the various scenes and incidents 
by which the plot was to be developed. 
Afterwards; the writing, and on the whole 
I was not altogether so ill-contented— 
though I daresay that I ought to have 
been disgusted—till it came to the last 
chapter. And that simply would not be 
written. I tried again and again; it was 
impossible. I could hit on no incident 
that would convey the required emotion; 
and at last I put away the uncompleted 
IMS. in despair; I was within an ace of 
tearing it to bits. But think of the suffer- 
ing, the misery, the bitter disappointment 
of those evenings. ‘True it was all a silly 


$7 


Things Near and Far 


thing, a toy; but an authority quoted in 
‘‘The Water Babies”’ says that one of the 
saddest sights in the world is a child cry- 
ing over a broken toy. My scheme was 
all silly, I allow; but I had set my heart 
on it, I had glowed with pride over it: 
and here it was all broken to pieces in my 
hands, a sorry, spoilt, piteous thing. 
True, I found some sort of an ending six 
months later; but that was not the same. 
There was no fun in that. You remem- 
ber the party in the cabrioily that called 
on Mrs. Bardell? There was a dis- 
pute about the precise situation of Mrs. 
Bardell’s house, and finally the driver, 
who had dismounted, led the horse by the 
bridle to the house with the red door. 


Here was a mean and low way of 
arriving at a friend’s house! No dash- 
ing up with all the fire and fury of the 
animal; no jumping down of the driver; 
no loud knocking at the door; no open- - 
ing of the apron with a crash at the 
very last moment. ... The whole 
edge of the thing had been taken off; 
it was flatter than walking. 


So with me and my story: I got to the 
58 


Things Near and Far 


house with the red door eventually; but 
the whole edge of the thing had been 
taken off. And so it has been with most 
of my books; I get, somehow or other, 
to the house with the red door, or to a 
house which I try to persuade myself is 
just as good; but on the way in the cabri- 
oily I have suffered so many disappoint- 
ments that I am in no condition to enjoy 
the pleasure of Mrs. Bardell’s society. I 
remember that, in writing “The Hill of 
Dreams,” I sat down every night for three 
weeks with blank paper before me, trying 
to get the second chapter. On some 
nights I wrote half a dozen lines, on other 
nights a couple of pages—before the eve- 
ning’s work went, hopeless, into the 
drawer. A few months later, having 
fallen on the wrong path, I had the 
pleasure of casting aside about 30,000 
words that I had written; and by the time 
the book was at last ended there were 
two neat| piles of MS. in my drawer; the 
one a little higher than the other. ‘The 
bigger pile consisted of the folios that I 
had written and had been forced to reject. 
And think of what that means; a heart- 
break to every other page and the com- 


59 


Things Near and Far 


ment of the author on himself and to 
himself: ‘You fool! Why do you pass 
your life in rending your heart, in trying 
to do the thing that you can’t do? Why 
weren't you brought up to sit by a brazier 
in the streets, to see that nobody steals 
the planks and railings and the wood pave- 
ment: to do something that with an effort 
you might be able to do?’ Or, to return 
to our former metaphor: “Don’t you 
see that you haven’t the knack of the 
toy maker? Then why will you persist 
in trying to make toys which always break 
in your hands, while you fill the air with 
lamentable boohoos?”’ 

And yet, as I have said, such has been 
my employment, with intermissions, from 
1880 to 1922. It was like that in 
1885-86. Night after night, when my 
father had knocked out his last pipe at 
eleven o’clock, did I draw out my papers 
from the table-drawer and set them under > 
the lamp. Winds came from the moun- 
tain of the west and shook the trees about 
the house and sighed and wailed; snows 
came from the mountains of the north 
and whitened the terraced lawn, black 
clouds drifted over Wentwood, the winter 


60 


Things Near and Far 


rains scourged the land; and still I wrote 
on in the silent house; struggling against 
the bitter conviction of my incapacity, as 
a man struggles and claws at the crum- 
bling earth when his foot has slipped and 
he is over the edge of the cliff. » Yet, 
stubborn, I wrote on late into the night, 
far into the morning, and as the year ad- 
vanced I often drew the heavy crimson 
curtain and looked out after I had put 
_ away my papers in the drawer, and saw a 
red or golden dawn streaming above the 
forest in the east. And as to the work 
itself? Let us not enquire too curiously; 
though I have always been proud of my 
parody of the terms of an ancient writ. 
— Diem clausit extremum, he has ended his 
last day, was the title of the writ, which 
is moved now and then even in these days: 
my writ was called Cyathum hausit ex- 
tremum: he has drained his last cup. 
And then there is the merum et mixtum 
cervisium, and the Charter of Terra Sab- 
ulosa or Sandy Soil, and the offices of 
Tankard Marshal and Clericus Spigotti, 
or Clerk of the Spigot; all choice jests—to 
adopt the manner of the work in question. 
But, as I say, let us not enquire too cu- 


61 


Things Near and Far 


riously into the merits of ‘“The Chron- 
icle of ‘Clemendy.” 1 ann content yt 
abide by the verdict of M. Octave Uz- 
anne, who is held, I believe, to be a good 
judge of letters. He said that it was “‘le 
renouveau de la Renaissance,” and that I 
was sure of my place beside Rabelais and 
Boccaccio, on the serene, immortal seats. 
I am surrendering my judgment wholly 
to that of M. Octave Uzanne. 

By the way; I do not know how it was, 
but the only copy sent out for review was 
addressed to ‘‘Le Livre,’ which was then 
edited by M. Uzanne. Somehow, no re- 
view copies found their way to the English 
papers. But the MS. had been shown to 
a pushing young literary gentleman, and 
he said that if it were properly “cut” it 
might make a good Christmas book for 
boys. 3 

And then, again, the question returns: 
why did I compel myself to undergo all © 
the toil and misery and disappointment 
that the writing of this ‘Chronicle of 
Clemendy” involved? It was my own 
choice, nobody stood over me with a stick 
to force me to do it. Why? Why do 
men row themselves into blueness and in- 


62 


Things Near and Far 


cipient heart disease at Henley and Put- 
ney? Why do men expose themselves to 
horrors, miseries and the instant risk of 
death on all the most desperate moun- 
tains of the world? ‘The answer is the 
same in all these cases: that cold mutton 
(or life) is in itself intolerable; that Le 
Gigot de Mouton froid, sauce Cyanide de 
Poiasse is better than the same dish nature. 


And, going further, the reason of this 
odd state of things is plain enough. The 
fact is, that what we commonly call life 
is not life at all. All the things that are 
considered serious, important and vital: 
the faithful earning of a living, the going 


to the City every morning to copy letters, 


keep accounts or float companies; the 
toils of the Chancery barrister, of the 
factory hand, of the doctor, of the shop- 
keeper, of the mining engineer, the affairs 


of all the serious and necessary employ- 


ments of life; these things are not life at 


Mall, They: are the curse’ of life, or, 


as it is sometimes called, the curse 


of Adam; as the theologians might have 


told us if they had not been too busy 


over the ‘‘curse of alcohol,” over the 


63 


Things Near and Far 


dubious moral influence of ‘“‘the pic- 
tures,’ over the decidedly frivolous char- 
acter of the lighter fiction of the day, and 
the demoralising effects of putting a bob 
on the winner—this dreadful offence, I 
believe, is held to ‘“‘harden the heart” 
more quickly and thoroughly than any 
other method. But this curse of getting a 
livelihood remains profoundly unnatural 
to man, in spite of his long experience of 
it: hence his frantic efforts to escape from 
what he erroneously calls life by running 
himself red in the face at Lord’s, by row- 
ing himself blue in the face at Henley, 
by drinking methylated spirit, by “‘put- 
ting on’ those criminal bobs, by playing 
mind-torturing games like chess, by knock- 
ing small balls into small holes, by climb- 
ing Alps—and even ‘by writing books. 
He will do anything to get away from 
what are called the serious facts of life 
and follow any track however desperate, © 
trivial, perilous, or painful, if only those 
serious facts can be evaded and forgotten, 
though it be but for a few hours. And 
so I wrote on, night after night, till the 
August of 1886 saw my task ended; and 
I immediately began to think of what I 
could write next. 


64 


Chapter IV 


the various quarters which I have oc- 

cupied in my forty-two years on-and- 
off life in London. When I first came 
up to town in 1880—the year when the 
play was the thing—I stayed at Wands- 
worth in an old Georgian house near the 
ugly Georgian church. I looked for it 
a few years ago, but I could not find it; 
I suspect that shops now flourish on its 
site and on the site of its grave old garden. 
_ Then, in 1881—2'I was domiciled ina house 
fronting Turnham Green; here, too, were 
ample lawns and gardens which, for all I 
know, may remainstill. Clarendon Road, 
as I have mentioned once or twice, enter- 
tained me in 83, 84, and again in ’85, and 
when I returned to London at the begin- 
ning of ’87 I lodged for a time in Upper 
Bedford Place, Russell Square. This 
place I left for an amusing reason. I had 
been out rather late. The festivity was 


65 


] «= just been trying to reckon up 


Things Near and Far 


not furious; simply a little and most infor- 
mal dance given by Mrs. Augusta Web- 
ster, in those days an admired poetess; 
and I suppose that it was half-past one 
when I got home from Hammersmith. 
I was moving softly up the stairs, and was 
a good deal puzzled to hear the clank- 
ing noise of metal on metal, as I passed 
the door of the first-floor bedroom. 
However, I supposed that somebody was 
ill and that the fire was being kept up. 
But the next morning, the landlady ad- 
dressed me gravely. She said that Mr. 
and Mrs. Sogden had been very much 
alarmed by hearing footsteps in the middle 
of the night, and had made preparations 
for receiving burglars; and on the whole 
the landlady thought that I should be 
much more comfortable at her sister’s in 
Great Russell Street, where no ladies were 
taken and things ‘“‘were more Bohemian.” 
And, indeed, she was quite right. ‘The - 
garret—a real garret, with a sloping roof 
and a dormer window—looked out on 
Dyott Street, the last remnant of the old 
rookery of St. Giles; the house was late 
seventeenth century or quite early eight- 
eenth, and the room, with tea and bread 
66 


Things Near and Far 


and butter breakfast included, only cost 
ten-and-six a week. Later in the year, I 
moved across the street and lived for a 
while over a stained-glass business; then 
I crossed again and lived over a tailor’s 
shop. January, 1890, found me in two 
rooms in Soho Street—undoubted seven- 
teenth century, panelled, with beautifully 
deep wooden cornices. And here took 
place the battle of the fleas. 

I had moved in, as I say, early in the 
year, incold weather. The rooms seemed 
quite all right, and the black tom cat of 
the premises was a remarkable and con- 
sistent character whom it was a privilege 
to know. His daily plan of dining with 
everyone in the house, from his own 
family in the basement to the people in 
the attics, finally welcoming the cat’s- 
meat man with loud shrieks, shewed, I 
thought, Mind. And, as I say, the cor- 
nice; well, I wish that I had been draughts- 
man enough to draw a section of it. 
Well, everything was as pleasant as it 
could be; and there, at the door, was all 
Soho to explore and investigate, and I 
suppose I need not say that Soho offered 
then, and still offers, I am glad to note, 

67 


Things Near and Far 


a large and curious field wherein the con- 
templative mind loves to expatiate. 

Very well; but the weather got warmer: 
and the fleas appeared. At first as single 
spies; and then in battalions. ‘They 
swarmed everywhere. They made life 
hideous and intolerable. I did not see 
what was to be done. My furniture, such 
as it was, occupied the rooms; it would 
be highly inconvenient for me to move. 
The advertised specifics were useless. I — 
isolated a flea—they were fair, large fleas 
—with a little of the powder, under a 
wine glass and watched his behaviour. 
He seemed happy, though perhaps a little 
torpid; he reminded me of a stout, red- 
faced old gentleman who has had two or 
three glasses of “hot Scotch,” and is in- 
clined to fall asleep by the tavern fire. 
Clearly, such mild measures were useless 
against the busy multitudes which swarmed 
allover my rooms. Then, I had a notion, 
a much more brilliant notion than anything 
that I have known in the region of litera- 
ture. I have an odd and random vein 
of practicality within me, and it came 
out in the Soho Street emergency. I took 
a large sheet of newspaper and brushed 


68 


Things Near and Far 


it over with treacle and laid it on the bed- 
room floor and waited for an hour or 
two. Atthe end of that time, a dozen or 
so of fleas were sticking fast to the treacle. 
I experienced the happy glow of the in- 
ventor; and now there was no dismal reac- 
tion. By the evening, there were at least 
six dozen fleas captured and out of action. 
I thought I might say, Eureka. 

- But then there came a difficulty. I dis- 
covered a certain property in treacle, 
which, so far as I know, is not recorded 
in scientific text-books. The matter of 
the work—to use the term of alchemy— 
was, I found, susceptible to weather. In 
certain states of the atmosphere, in place 
of being sticky, it became crystalline and 
as hard as glass. I do not know whether 
this interesting property of treacle can be 
utilised for forecasting purposes. But 
this hardness rendered it useless for my 
immediate end. The large, fair fleas 
hopped on to the trap and hopped away. 
I surveyed the problem anew. Again the 
flash akin to genius. I thought of fly- 
papers and bought half a dozen. The 
battle was over in a few weeks. I kept 
a careful daily account, and in a month, 


69 


Things Near and Far 


or perhaps five weeks, I had captured 
over three thousand fleas. And I had 
purged the first floor of 12 Soho Street 
utterly of all the race. I recollect well 
one night’s bag. I had been to see “A 
Pair of Spectacles” at the Garrick, and 
when I came home I found I had got 120 
fine fleas. 

And then, having won this notable vic- 
tory, a very odd distaste for London came 
upon me. Iam not joking; the sentiment — 
had nothing to do with the insects whom 
I had defeated; but, somehow, London 
sickened me. Its faint, hot summer airs 
were an oppression, its swarming streets 
a tribulation; I thought of cold wells in 
the hills and running brooks and _ the 
breath of the wood and the mountain in 
the early morning—and I resolved to be 
a countryman again. So I took a cottage 
high up on the Chiltern Hills, and while 
qertain alterations were being made, I 
left for Tours, Touraine, France. 

The Rabelaisian enthusiasm was still 
upon me. I had just issued a translation 
(called ‘“‘Fantastic Tales’) of that ex- 
traordinary and enigmatic book, ‘Le 
Moyen de Parvenir,” by Beroalde de Ver- 


7O 


Things Near and Far 


ville, who was a canon of Tours Cathe- 
dral. Soto Touraine I went; to see the 
land of Rabelais, of Beroalde, of Balzac. 
And the odd thing is, that my first Sunday 
afternoon in Tours—lI got there on a Sat- 
urday—was a severe disappointment. 
The fact was that I had taken Doré’s 
wonderful illustrations to the ‘‘Contes 
Drolatiques” for granted. I supposed 
that the enchanted heights, the profound 
and sombre valleys, the airy abysses of 
these amazing plates represented, with a 
little exaggeration, perhaps, the veritable 
scenery of Touraine. You remember the 
picture showing how that sinful little page 
climbed the heights of Marmoutier to con- 
fess his sin to the Abbot? Well, that 
Sunday afternoon, early in September, 
1890, I set out from the Faisan, in the Rue 
Royale, to see the tremendous ascent of 
Marmoutier. I crossed the bridge over 
the Loire, most of it sand with a swift 
stream here and there, and arrived at 
Portillon, where the conductor of the 
steam tram was calling out, “‘Marmou- 
tiers, Rochecorbon, Vouvray” in a melodi- 
ous chant. But I walked along the road 
to Marmoutiers. Alas! there were no 


71 


Things Near and Far 


terrific heights, as in the picture. Imagine 
something like the high ground near the 
river at Henley; nothing higher, nothing 
as high. Instead of the dark green woods 
of Henley, golden rocks and golden earth 
shining in a very happy sun; little villas, 
larger villas, everywhere with gardens 
that were gardens indeed. Green walled 
closes, with rich green lawns; fountains in 
the midst of them, flowering shrubs and 
flowery creepers blossoming and trailing — 
everywhere; kitchen gardens where the 
peaches glowed and burned dark against 
the hot white walls, where the pears on 
the dwarf trees were as shapes of golden 
honey: at last the old cloture of the Abbey 
of Marmoutier with pepper-pot turrets at 
intervals, close to the road, and inside the 
enclosure, the modern buildings of a con- 
vent school: and the mellow, river cliff 
behind all. It was delightful; but it was 
not a bit like Dore. I confess, my heart | 
sank. And then going on by the river — 
road, I got to Rochecorbon. Still the 
warm cliff overhung the road, underneath 
it a small hamlet with a tavern, “A la 
Lanterne de Rochecorbon,” and perched 
on the edge of the cliff the Lantern, an 


72 


Things Near and Far 


odd structure which looked something like 
an ancient factory chimney, and was, | 
suppose, the sole relic of the ancient castle 
celebrated by Balzac. It took me some 
time before I could get Doré’s Touraine 
out of my mind and enjoy the Touraine 
of actuality on its own merits. And these 
are many. ‘There were great moments 
on this first visit to the garden of France. 

I was staying at the Faisan in the Rue 
Royale—that street which Balzac, who 
was born in it, praises as being “always 
royal, always imperial,’’ which in these 
later days has taken to calling itself the 
Rue Nationale—a delicious inn indeed. 
I got the recommendation from Thack- 
eray. Philip stayed there once. He 
calls it the ‘‘Faisan d’Or.” It had three 
courtyards, or rather a courtyard and two 
gardens, both closed in by the hotel walls. 
You entered the courtyard under the arch- 
way in the Rue Royale; to the left was 
the dining-room hung with tapestries de- 
picting in an ancient mode the famous 
castles of Touraine; on the right was the 
kitchen, all bright with glowing copper 
pots, and the big round cook standing at 
the open door or bending over his fur- 


73 


Things Near and Far 


nace, occasionally shaking one of his pots 
knowingly and beaming on you as you sat 
at your little table in the courtyard as 
much as to say: ‘‘You will find it good.” 
Around this great man were four or five 
boys, all in white like their chief, who 
seemed to be busy all day long in washing 
vegetables, in chopping meat and herbs fine 
for farses, in manifold culinary employ- 
ments, running out now and again and 
shaking showers from bags full of wet — 
lettuce or endive leaves. At the back 
were the stables, and on market days the 
yard of the Faisan was full, like an Eng- 
lish inn yard, of all manner of queer traps 
and shandridans from the country. And 
beyond this courtyard, at the back of the 
house, were the two gardens, secret, re- 
tired and delicious. Such green turf was 
there in these chosen places, so pleasant 
a music in one of them of a singing foun- 
tain, so glowing the flowers about it with 
the water drops glittering on them, so 
sweet the shade of overhanging boughs— 
there are here and there gardens that ad- 
dress the heart and spirit and not the 
florist, as Poe knew well. : 
And thinking of the Faisan at Tours 


74 


Things Near and Far 


and of its curious delights, how is it that 
much money—one may say the wealth of 
the whole world—cannot buy anything 
like this in London? Money will get you 
a set of rooms thirty feet or so in height 
from floor to ceiling, it will buy you the 
use of suites of furniture that make you 
wonder when you wake up in the morning 
whether by any chance you can have 
turned into Louis XV in your sleep; it 
will buy you bathrooms all marble and 
tessellated pavement, dining-rooms as 
marblous and Louisquinzious as your pri- 
vate suites; but delights such as are af- 
forded by the Faisan at Tours it will by 
no means buy. It is a pity; at least l 
think so. But then I can never fancy 
that I am Louis XV even for a moment, 
and that, I suppose, is the reason why I 
don’t like living in the style of that mon- 
arch, why I don’t even like lunching or 
dining in palatial halls built and furnished 
in his fayourite manner. And I doubt 
whether the grandest of all grand hotels 
in our London could furnish you with a 
bottle of Vouvray Nature of a named 
clos, for any money that your million- 
aire’s purse could proffer. 


75 


Things Near and Far 


And the mention of that admirable 
amber wine of Vouvray, the wine wherein 
an argent bead rises at intervals through 
the mellow gold, reminds me of my first 
night at the Faisan. All down the tables 
were portly decanters of wine, red and 
white. I chose red, and found it a new 
sensation in wine vastly to my taste. It 
was, of course, an ordinary wine, and a 
little wine, I think of the kind called Joué 
Noble, from the place of its growth, a 
parish by the Cher river. It was scented 
like flowers in June; it was in its entirely 
unpretending way quite exquisite. I 
drank it with relish, and towards the end 
of dinner I had accounted for about three- 
parts of the decanter. Swiftly came the 
head waiter and bore it away and as 
swiftly put another and a full decanter in 
its place. It was almost too much; ‘‘tem- 
perance’’ enthusiasts would say a great 
deal too much. I thought solemnly to 
myself as I smoked a grateful pipe after 
dinner in the courtyard: ‘‘This night I 
have had as much good red wine as ever 
I could drink.’’ And this was one of the 
great moments of my visit to Touraine. 

And then there was Chinon. The 

76 


Things Near and Far 


train passed through the deep darkness 
of Chinon Forest, and you leave the sta- 
tion and come out into the sunlight. 
Here is a narrow river valley: the clear 
Vienne in the middle of it; to the left a 
gently rising land, rich with vines; to the 
right a long, golden, precipitous cliff, 
golden in such a sunlight as we never see 
in England. As in the backgrounds of 
the old Italian masters, the trees stand out 
clearly, vividly, distinctly against the sky; 
so was it at Chinon. That long, mould- 
ering and golden cliff was surmounted 
by the walls of the old castle, golden and 
mouldering also, irradiated; and from the 
river to the cliff the town climbed up; nar- 
row ways, winding ways, steep ways, and 
every here and there the grey-blue tou- 
relles of the fifteenth-century houses 
piercing upwards; and the dark mass of 
the forest stretching far and far away 
beyond. And then the thought that the 
man who had received one of the great 
visions of reality once walked these ways, 
and looked on a scene that had not much 
changed since his time; that the golden 
and rich sunlight had shone on him also, 
in the hour when the amazing, terrible, 


77 


Things Near and Far 


tremendous figures and symbols of the 
vision of Pantagruel, Panurge, Friar 
John, the three who are yet one came to 
him, we must conjecture, in clouds and 
darkness and uncertainties, as he listened 
to the new song of the vineyards, and the 
vine and the outpoured wine: all this was 
made a great moment also. I sat ona 
sort of bridge—if I remember—yjoining 
the two parts of the ruined castle, sat on 
golden stones, and looked down on the 
Chinon of the grey-blue tourelles, on the 
shining Vienne, and the gentle vine-covered 
slope, and I thought of the cloudy young 
man stumbling over that hard French of 
Rabelais far into the night, in obscure 
Clarendon Road, long ago. It was not 
long ago; this was of ’90 and that was of 
85, but hard pains make long years. I 
went down the hill again, past the foun- 
tain, and drank the red wine of Chinon 
solemnly, reverently in a dark tavern in © 
one of the dark, narrow streets. It was 


called ‘‘Le Caveau de Rabelais.”’ 


I came back to London in the autumn 
and took rooms in Guilford Street till 
that cottage on the Chilterns should be 


78 


Things Near and Far 


ready for occupation. Then from 1891 
I lived in the country, and found it noth- 
ing, and came back to London in the au- 
tumn of 1893, to an “upper part” in Great 
Russell Street, a little westward of the 
British Museum. It was then that I 
began to explore London, and to realise 
its vastness, its immensities. Things are 
relative; I began now to appreciate the 
fact that if you set out, without a map, 
from your house at 36 Great Russell 
Street and walk for an hour eastward or 
northward you are in fact in an unknown 
region, a new world. Continually you 
stand on a peak in Darien, and look out 
on undiscovered territories, inhabited by 
peoples of whom you know nothing. I 
would go along Great Russell Street, and 
turn up into Russell Square, and then go 
by Guilford Street, crossing Gray’s Inn 
Road, and so find myself, like the knight 
in the song, “ten leagues beyond the wide 
world’s end.” I would go northward, up 
the Gray’s Inn Road, and then turn to the 
right, descend into a valley and climb a 
height and so come to a region which was 
to me as the ultimate parts of Libya, and 
the lands of the Mountains of the Moon. 


v9 


Things Near and Far 


I shall never forget the awe with which 
I first came upon the other Baker Street, 
the Baker Street which would enter no 
taxi-driver’s mind; those houses climbing 
up the hill into Lloyd Square, stucco 
houses with classic pediments, but all tot- 
tering, askew, and falling into decay; the 
jerry building of 1820-30. And, I re- 
member, seeing on one of the leaning and 
doubtful doors here the brass plate of 
someone who said that he was a 
“Buhl Maker.” I wonder. Did some- 
one really labour in this forsaken, climb- 
ing street in that rich eighteenth-century 
' art of brass and tortoiseshell, fashioning — 
curious cabinets and escritoires! How 
unlikely it seemed; more unlikely than an- 
other announcement on a modest door in 
the recesses of Camden Town, to the 
effect that here were made Shell Boxes. 
Often I went up Baker Street and stood 
in Lloyd’s Square and looked down on ~ 
London, on Gilbert Scott’s horrible, vil- 
lainous sham-Gothic St. Pancras Station 
and on all the vague, smoky, weary streets 
about it. Here, one evening, the sun 
flamed suddenly and struck the windows 
of a school below and lit fires in them: 
80 


Things Near and Far 


hence the lines—in “‘A Fragment of Life” 
—entitled: ‘Lines written on looking 
down from a Height in London on a 
Board School suddenly lit up by the sun.” 
And here I would say that the matter 
of Wonder—that is the matter of the arts 
—is everywhere offered to us. It is, I 
am sure, true, as the feeble though pious 
Keble wrote, that: 


The daily round, the common task 
Will furnish all we need to ask. 


And it is utterly true that he who cannot 
find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of 
a new world and an undiscovered realm in 
the places: by the Gray’s Inn Road will 
never find those secrets elsewhere, not in 
the heart of Africa, not in the fabled hid- 
den cities of Tibet. ‘The matter of our 
work is everywhere present,’ wrote the 
old alchemists, and that is the truth. All 
the wonders lie within a stone’s-throw of 
King’s Cross Station. 

I remember that when, later on, I wrote 
a book on the principles of literary criti- 
cism called “Hieroglyphics,” a good many 
of the reviewers found grave fault with 
my dictum that all fine literature is the 
81 


Things Near and Far 


work of ecstasy and the inspirer of 
ecstasy. ‘‘In other words,” said these 
clever fellows, ‘‘a good book is a book 
that you happen to like. But other 
people may have very different tastes and 
likings; no doubt many people experience 
ecstasy in reading a newspaper feuilleton. 
Is the feuilleton therefore fine literature?” 
The objection, I hasten to say, is perfectly 
legitimate. Tens of thousands, or hun- 
dreds of thousands of people, I have no 
doubt, read the newspaper feuilleton in an 
ecstasy of delight. I once found myself, 
to my dumb, almost awestruck horror, in 
a drawing-room where a number of tol- 
erably well-educated people were engaged 
in taking’ ‘the ‘works of 2°; >well| 
Miss Thingumbob, seriously. Doubtless, 
then, there are many people who find rar- 
ities and wonders in matter that you and I 
pronounce to be contemptible or detestable 
or just nothing at all: my reviewers were 
perfectly right. But if you accept their 
ruling you put an end to criticism of all 
sorts. I could form a large company of 
coalheavers, financiers, sporting noble- 
men, gardeners, journalists, ladies of 
82 


Things Near and Far 


quality, actors, scavengers—I was going 
to add bishops, but they rarely speak the 
honest truth—and myself who had very 
much rather not see the famous Prima- 
vera and the famous Monna Lisa Gio- 
conda than see them, who had rather— 
again I include myself—listen to George 
\Robey’s songs and gags and wheezes than 
to ‘“Hamlet.”’ But what does that prove? 
Simply, I suppose, that so far as the pic- 
tures and the play are concerned my 
friends and myself cannot rise to these 
particular heights. As an old friend of 
mine once observed very well, “We all of 
us have some windows that are darkened.”’ 
My friend is a musician, and remembering 
his maxim, I was much diverted one day 
by hearing him speak with easy contempt 
of the composer of ‘‘Acis and Galatea.” 
But it is true that each one of us has some 
darkened windows: Oscar Wilde confessed 
to me once, with shame be it said, that 
he thought absinthe a detestable drink. 
But no inference can be drawn from this 
undoubted fact. It always stirs in me a 
certain feeling of impatience when I see 
the solemn correspondence, the more 


83 


Things Near and Far 


solemn leading articles under the dread 
heading, ‘‘What is Wrong with the 
Church?” It is alleged, I am sure with 
complete truth, that a great many people 
do not go to church; and the conclusion 
is drawn that the Church must be very 
gravely at fault. Now this may be true 
also—I think it, is—but it is a conclusion 
not to be deduced from the minor premiss, 
the sole premiss stated. Scholastic logic, 
the only logic that is worth twopence, the 
‘new logic” being, as an Oxford graduate 
once very sensibly observed to me, merely 
‘nonsense about things,’ is now unfash- 
ionable, so, I suppose I shall be thought 
somewhat boorish for exhibiting the news- 
paper syllogism at full length, supplying 
the suppressed major. But here it is: 

That which is unpopular is worthless. 

The Church is unpopular. 

Therefore, the Church is worthless. 
In other words, as one of the ladies in 
the cabrioily—to which I have already 
alluded—observed: ‘‘Most Votes carries 
the day.’’ Very well; but how does the 
attendance on the pictures in the National 
Gallery compare with the attendance at 
‘the pictures?’ And shall we try the ex- 


84 


Things Near and Far 


periment of “knocking” the music-halls, 
the revue houses and the musical comedy 
houses by running Bach’s Organ and Cla- 
vier Fugues at popular prices? Perhaps 
the purse of Rockefeller might, survive 
the experiment; certainly no other purse 
would hold anything after a year of it. 
IMr. Walkley of ‘The Times’ proposes 
to solve the difficulty of criticism by mak- 
ing the critic address himself to 6 xapuets, 
the well-graced and accomplished man. 
But who is he? Each one of us 1s a good 
judge—in his own judgment. And tech- 
nical instruction is nothing. No one in 
his senses would seek anything vital as 
to Greek or Latin poetry from a classical 
don at Oxford or Cambridge. Keats, 
poor, shabby John, who had only been to 
a commercial academy, knew more about 
Greek poetry than a wilderness of clas- 
sical tutors. 

But, I was going to say, all these con- 
siderations apply to the known and rec- 
ognised arts, to literature, music, paint- 
ing, architecture. In all these I am will- 
ing to admit I may be hopelessly wrong 
—I have said that I had much rather hear 
Robey than ‘“Hamlet’’—but I will listen 


85 


Things Near and Far 


to no objections or criticisms as to the Ars 
Magna of London, of which I claim to 
be the inventor, the professor and the 
whole school. Here I am artist and judge 
at once, and possess the whole matter of 
the art within myself. For, let it ‘be 
quite clearly understood, the Great Art 
of London has nothing to do with any 
map or guide-book or antiquarian knowl- 
edge, admirable as these are; and indeed 
Peter Cunningham’s ‘‘London” is to me 
one of the choicest of books. But the 
Great Art is a matter of quite another 
sphere; and as to maps, for example, if 
known they must be forgotten. How 
would the Odyssey have read, do ‘you 
imagine, if Ulysses had been furnished 
with Admiralty Charts, giving the sound- 
ings in fathoms, even to the exact depth 
of water in the harbourage of Calypso’s 
isle? And all historical associations; 
they too must be laid aside. Mr. Pick- 
wick at Bury St. Emunds has nothing to 
do with the history of the famous abbey. 
Of all this the follower of the London 
Art must purge himself when he set out 
on his adventures. For the essence of this 
art is that it must be an adventure into 


86 


Things Near and Far 


the unknown, and perhaps it may be 
found that this, at last, is the matter of 
all the arts. 

And it was this art of London that 
I followed, while I lived in Great 
Russell Street between ’93 and ’95, and 
still more earnestly afterwards when I was 
living at Verulam Buildings, Gray’s Inn. 
Sometimes I took a friend with me on 
my journeys, but not often. The secret 
of it all was hidden from them, and they 
were apt to become violent. On one 
grey day that I remember I had personally 
conducted a man on a most interesting 
exploration of the obscurer byways of Is- 
lington. He grew silent as the streets 
grew greyer and the squares dimmer and 
the remoteness of the whole region from 
any conceivable London that he knew 
filtered through his soul. His London 
was Piccadilly, the Haymarket, St. 
James’s, and the many polite neighbour- 
hoods where there are flats and calls are 
paid and tea is taken and literary and 
theatrical and artistic circles meet and 
gather. But this London that was a 
grey wilderness, these streets that went 
to the beyond and beyond, these squares 


87 


Things Near and Far 


which nobody that) my friend could ever 
have known could ever inhabit: it was 
all too much for him. His face dark- 
ened with terror and hate, and with a 
poisonous glance at me he struck his 
golden-headed cane violently on the pave- 
ment, and stopping dead, exclaimed: “I 
wish to God I could see a hansom!” 
So, of course, I never took him to Barns- 
bury.), As’ for) Brentford, that’ is “the 
Great Magisterium, the Hidden Secret. 
There is a Secret Society of those initiated 
in Brentford, and so darkly is the mys- 
tery kept that there have been cases in 
which members have known each other 
intimately for twenty years before the 
passwords have been exchanged. 


88 


Chapter V 
[ oe been talking of rooms in 


Gray’s Inn, of trips to Touraine; 
and I suppose it will have become 
evident that the days of the Clarendon 
Road cell, of dry bread and green tea 
meals were over. ‘This was, in fact, the 
case. Between ’87 and ’92 I “came into 
money,” that is, into what I called money. 
My mother died in 1885, my father in 
1887; distant and ‘ancient relatives in 
Scotland who had lived to fabulous ages 
died at last, and thus moneys that should 
have come to my mother came to me. 
And I was no longer the lonely man of the 
earlier chapters. 
Reckoning up the various sums which 
I inherited, I calculate that if they had 
been invested I should have had enough 
whereon to live narrowly and meanly for 
the next thirty years. Somewhere about 
1921 a long lease would have fallen in, 
and two-thirds of my income would have 


89 


Things Near and Far 


disappeared. I should then have been 
left with sixty pounds a year at the out- 
side, and even with the “‘aconomy”’ recom- 
mended by Captain Costigan, there is 
very little to be done in these days with 
£60 per annum. But I did not invest 
my fortune in sound securities. Perhaps 
I might have done so if it had fallen in 
a lump on my lap; but this was not the 
way of it. It came in bits and parcels: 
£700 one year, £500 eighteen months 
afterwards. So I adopted, the simple, 
manly course of putting my money as I 
got it into a box, as it were, and dipping 
my hand into the box when I needed a 
few gold pieces. I wish it were possible 
to do this literally: it must be magnificent 
to live on a chestful of gold; but I com- 
promised by getting a cheque-book. 

And I have always been glad that I 
made this business-like arrangement. 
By it I was enabled to live for eleven or — 
twelve years under pleasant and humane 
conditions. Not in luxury, be it under- 
stood, for luxury has always been utterly 
detestable to me. Detestable to me, I 
say with emphasis; I do not say that lux- 
ury is detestable in itself. If men like 


ee) 


Things Near and Far 


to have it so, by all means let them dwell 
in marble halls, with vassals and serfs 
and wine-stewards at their side. Let them 
be as Louisquinzious as ever they please 
in their homes and at their hotels; for all 
I care, they may take their ease in snug- 
geries, all gold and mirrors and marbles, 
fifty feet high, a hundred feet high, if 
they like it so. But to me, a poor clerk, 
all this has ever been nauseous. When 
I plied my sorry trade of journalist, | 
disliked most! things involved in that vile 
business, but I hated my occasional mis- 
sions to the Hotel Splendide and the 
Hotel Glorieux. I would be sent to these 
places to find out, say, the exact method 
employed by the new chef, M. Mirobolant, 
in cooking red herrings for the famous 
Joy Teas in the Venetian Hall—every- 
body has heard of the Joy Teas at the 
Splendide, and of the Joy Band of twenty 
kettle-drums, fifty tea-trays, ten trom- 
bones and thirty bassoons. Well, I would 
be sent to the Splendide on this errand; 
or, perhaps, to the Glorieux to find out 
whether it were true that! the principals 
of the Russian Ballet sucked their morn- 
ing tea through raspberry jam and de- 


OI 


Things Near and Far 


clared that this was necessary to their 
art. I would visit one or other of these 
establishments and sit down on Louis 
Quinze or Louis Seize chairs and wait 
there in my dingy old cloak, while ‘‘Recep- 
tion” and “‘Enquiries” smiled to see suca 
an incongruous figure before them, while 
the guests of the hotel smiled also as they 
went in and out, till at last the manager 
arrived, fretful enough, usually, at being 
dragged from his business or his leisure. 
to answer idiotic questions. I used to 
wonder on these Splendide or Glorieux 
days what I had done to deserve such 
humiliations. The only thing that some- 
what consoled me was the thought that, 
whatever pains the Doctor may have suf- 
fered, while he waited in Lord Chester- 
field’s outward rooms or was repulsed 
from that nobleman’s door, my case was 
more humiliating still, since an English | 
nobleman of race is a much greater per- 
sonage than the shiniest of hotel man- 
agers. And perhaps, also, I fancied that 
I was beginning to follow a little in the 
faithful steps of Venerable Raymondus 
Anglus, who was slowly sliced into little 
pieces in Cathay. 


g2 


Things Near and Far 


Rather, I am afraid, in the steps of a 
relative of my own, some distant Cousin 
Machen, whom business, I suppose, took 
to Cathay in the ‘fifties and ’sixties of the 
last century. It so fell out that while this 
gentleman was in China we declared one 
of our infamous Opium Wars against the 
Dragon Throne and the Vermilion Pencil. 
Promptly the local mandarin seized 
Cousin Machen and put him in a cage. 
They then travelled him round the Chi- 
nese ‘‘Smalls.’”’ When the cortége got to 


_a village or town, my cousin’s custodians 


touched him up smartly with their spears. 
Cousin Machen would then dance with an- 


- guish, and, I am sure, most ungracefully, 


and the happy villagers, howling with 
mirth, and voting Cousin Machen good 
goods, would pelt the poor man with un- 
desirable matters. He got away from 
them, but I have heard my relations say 
that in extreme old age the mere word 
“China”? was enough to bring a sweat of 
horror pouring down his face. And I am 
in a position to sympathise fully with 
Cousin Machen 

Well, I was saying, I think, that I 
never cared for luxury, and so did not 


93 


Things Near and Far 


waste my biti of money on it. But if 
luxury tempts me not at all, I care a great 
deal for homely comfort, and I lived in 
considerable comfort in the days of which 
I am speaking. I think that my annual 
budget was between four and five hun- 
dred a year, and let me tell an amazed 
generation that for five hundred a year or 
rather less two people could live very 
sufficiently in the ’eighties and ‘nineties. 
Your saddle of mutton and your sirloin 
of beef were of the best, lamb at Easter 
—is there anything better than spring 
lamb with its skin roasted to a golden- 
brown ?—was easily attainable; fowls and 
ducks, grouse and partridges and pheas- 
ants, with now and then that most de- 
licious bird the woodcock, were no rar- 
ities. And asparagus might well appear 
quite early in the spring, and green peas 
in advance of the main crop. And some-- 
times one felt that’ it would be amusing 
to go out to dinner for a change: well, 
the bill of the Soho restaurant never gave 
an indigestion afterwards. Sometimes 
the Soho dinners were quite good, they 
were always amusing; and in those days 
there was such a thing as decent Chianti. 


of 


} 
i 


Things Near and Far 


It came to the cheerful table in flasks of 
very thin glass, and between the cork and 
the wine was a stratum of olive oil. 


This the waiter flicked off on to the lino- 


leum with a swift gesture. The last 
Chianti of this order that I tasted was 
in 1902. I saw great gallon flasks of it 
standing in the window of a small shop 
opposite the stage door of the Palace, 


and bought one of these flasks—it cost 


six shillings, if I remember—and bore it 
tenderly to my dressing-room at the St. 
James’s Theatre. It was the last night 
of “Paolo and Francesca,’’ and we drank 
the Chianti merrily in trunk ‘hose ‘and 


armour when the play was done. And 


Herbert Dansey, who was really a noble 
Florentine, ‘“‘degli Tassinari,” vowed you 
could get no better Chianti in all Tuscany. 

Or again, one didn’t fancy roast beef, 
and yet one didn’t want to go out dining. 
There was the middle course; Salame or 


-Mortadella, half a round of ripe Brie and 


a bottle of a sufficient red or white wine. 
And a half-bottle of Benedictine only 
cost four-and-six. And the whole of the 
small banquet ran into very little: they 
were cheap days, and the Income Tax was 


oS 


Things Near and Far 


inconsiderable then. But I was forget- 
ting. I had no income, so I saved the 
expense of the tax. And under these 
conditions, living very pleasantly, with a 
month in France every year, I cultivated 
literature between 1890-1900. I re- 
frained, utterly, I am glad to say, from 
the impious folly of wondering what 
would happen when the money should 
have come to an end. When that day 
came, why, that day could see to it. 
Living very pleasantly; that is, apart 
from my chosen sport of making books. 
I have already discussed the strange par- | 
adox of writing, of writing, that is, when 
it is entirely divorced from all commer- 
cial considerations. JI wrote purely to 
please myself; and what a queer pleasure 
it was! To write, or to try to write, 
means involving oneself in endless dif- 
ficulties, contrarieties, torments, despairs,. 
and yet I wrote on, and I suppose for the 
reason which I have given, the necessity 
laid upon most of us to create another 
and a fantastic life in order that the life 
of actuality may be endurable. Look at 
the golfer: observe how he toils and frets 
in that fantastic world that he has made 
96 


Things Near and Far 


for himself, a world wherein he who can 
say, “I did the fourth hole in two’’ is 
happy; while the wretch who had to hit 
the little white ball six or seven times be- 
fore he finally popped into that fourth 
hole goes out wretchedly into the night. 
It is fantastic nonsense; but for all that 
the golfers are in the right. 

Still, there may be a little more in the 
sport of literature; and if the golfers feel 
hurt by this remark, let them remember 
that a man always praises his own game. 
We understand so little of the real scheme 
of things that, for all we know, golf may 
be the end for which man was made, as, 
according to Coleridge, snuff was the final 
term of the human nose. But waiving 
this possibility—I think a remote one— 
I would contend that literature has more 
in it on the whole. Being an art as well 
as a sport, there is a question of making 
something, and very occasionally of mak- 
ing something that will divert or enchant 
others, besides the maker; whereas the 
sport which is nothing but a sport has no 
such by-products as “Don Quixote” or 
“Pickwick.” Of course the man who 
plays a game, such as golf or cricket, often 


97 


Things Near and Far 


gives pleasure—or amusement, at all 
events—to many spectators; but when the 
match is over and the last ball bowled 
nothing permanent remains. So far as 
others are concerned the player of games 
is much in the position of the player of 
plays. The actor thrills the house or 
rocks it with laughter; but the curtain 
falls and all is over. We know that the 
best judges of the eighteenth century 
found Garrick natural, simple, affecting; 
but we know no more. We have pic- 
tures of Garrick in his favourite situa- 
tions; but I at least have no distinct im- 
age in my mind of what it was really like 
to be in the front row of the pit at Drury 
Lane and see and hear Garrick play. 
And, this apart, I cannot help thinking 
that the pleasures of the literary game are 
more intense and more exquisite than the 
pleasures of the other games. I know 
this is a very dificult question; there is 
no final answer to it. But I feel sure that 
the happiness of Charles Dickens on writ- 
ing the last words of ‘“‘David Copperfield” 
was greater than the happiness of the 
cricketer at Lord’s who carries out his bat 
for a faultless innings of two hundred 


98 


Things Near and Far 


against the most difficult bowling and the 
best fielding in England. I do not know 
that this is so, but I conjecture that it is 
so, chiefly because the joys of the writer 
of a great romance are so varied and so 
complex in comparison with the joys of 
the man who has played a perfect innings. 
In a sense, perhaps, the first-rate cricketer 
has achieved the more perfect perform- 
ance: he has met every difficulty splen- 
didly, his judgment as to running has been 
impeccable, he has not given a single 
chance. ,,Fhe writer, on the other hand, 
is—I think we may say—never perfect: 
consider those last chapters of ‘‘Don 
Quixote’; consider Steerforth and that 
infernal . . . woman, Agnes; the Grand- 
father and Little Nell. Yet the man of 
the book has traversed such an infinitely 
wider region than the man of the bat and 
ball: he has perhaps rectified the work of 
the Creator and made himself anew and 
made himself much better; and so he has 
worked with all the world, fashioning a 
new life, discovering wonders where be- 
fore there were no wonders, shewing 
secrets that had been hidden from the’ 
foundation of things, peering now and 


99 


% om _ Things Near and Far 

again, as Poe and Hawthorne peered, 
into the places of thick darkness, and, 
above all, voyaging into the unknown, 
perpetually climbing the steep white track 
that vanishes over the hill. 


100 


Chapter VI 


FE are, I think, in the period 
1890-1900; or, perhaps, to be 
| more). accurate,  let...us. say 


1889-1899. Between these dates I made 
a translation of ‘‘Le Moyen de Parvenir,”’ 
an early seventeeth-century book by an 
odd follower of Rabelais. I wrote ‘‘The 
Great God Pan,” ‘The Inmost Light,” 
“The Three Impostors,” ‘The Hill of 
Dreams,” a short collection of experi- 
ments called ) Ornaments’ -in:t/Jade,,! 
“Hieroglyphics,” ‘““The White People,” 
the first part of “A Fragment of Life,” 
and ‘‘The Red Hand.’ As I have said, I 
had inherited a little capital and spent it, 
and at ample leisure wrote these books 
and tales, instead of doing honest work. 
In the words of some character in ‘The 
Three Impostors,” I regarded my various 
legacies as an endowment of research. 

Now, as to the first title on this list,a 
was inspired to translate “Le Moyen de 
IOI 


Things Near and Far 


Parvenir” by that earlier Rabelaisian 
enthusiasm, which had lasted on. I 
found the book (in the original edition, 
I think), a little dumpy volume, while I 
was in the employment of a firm of second- 
hand booksellers who lived not far from 
Leicester Square. I have been called a 
modest man in an after-dinner speech, and 
I hope I am one; but I am sure I was mod- 
est in 1888. For, finding that I could not 
get a ‘“‘rise’’ on the £60 a year which York 
Street’ attlordéd’” me,” 1) tried Leicester 
Square and asked as much as £80; thirty 
shillings a week. I think the firm were 
amused; but they gave it me, and I set 
about cataloguing books for them. 

I did this under odd conditions. . When 
I made my application, the Brothers— 
let us say—took me down to the place in 
the basement where my work would have 
to be done. Once, I suppose, it had been 
the underground back-kitchen of the house. 
The kitchen was occupied by two other 
employees of the firm. One of them 
kept the accounts; the other treated 
‘‘foxed” plates and pages in baths and 
made them fresh again, and ‘“‘grang- 
erised”’ and packed up books that had been 

102 


Things Near and Far 
bought. And the kitchen had the illum- 


ination from the solid glass over which 
people walked as they passed the shop, 
and some sort of air from the outer world. 
But my workshop had neither one nor 
the other. Save for gas, it was in total 
darkness. Its air was dead. And the 
House asked me very fairly whether I 
thought I could stand it. I said I could, 
and so I went to work. 

I was,never any good at cataloguing, 
real, technical cataloguing. I was ex- 
plaining the other day to a friend of mine, 
a most accomplished and learned cata- 
loguer, how I despised his work. ‘‘This 
business,” I said, “of putting little slanty 
lines between the words of a title-page. 
A pitiable job,” I proceeded, ‘‘it must be 
so since I could never make anything of 
it, * ‘But, the truth is, [ néver- had any 
heart for the work. I don’t care two- 
pence whether a book is in the first edition 
or in the tenth; nay, if the tenth is the 
best edition, I would rather have it. To 
me it appears mere childishness to con- 
sider whether Lowndes—I think that is 
one of the authorities—has seen three 
copies of some particular book or three 
103 


Things Near and Far 


hundred; the only question being: is the 
book worth reading or not? Then, when 
it comes to measuring an Elzevir, say, 
with a graduated rule, and pronouncing a 
little book three inches and a half high to 
be a “‘tall copy,’ my common sense revolts. 
In other words, I am sure that Bibliogra- 
phy is a capital game, but it is not my 
game. I disliked my work of cataloguing; 
but I loathed another branch of my work, 
that was indexing. Everybody knows 
about “grangerising.”’ You take a book, 
say, Smith’s ‘“‘Life of Nollekens.” In it 
many eighteenth-century personages are 
mentioned, and many London streets 
and public places. The indexer has 
to read through the book, noting every 
person, every place, and compile an index. 
And on this index the grangeriser, the 
bookseller, goes to work hunting his stock 
of plates, hunting certain well-known 
sources for pictures with which he can stuff 
the original work. He will destroy a 
dozen or a hundred or a thousand other 
books of less value to produce a kind of 
monster: “The Life of Nollekens, by 
Joseph Smith, 1 voli; 8vos,. 1-4) Bre 
larged to 3 vols. quarto, and furnished 


104. 


Things Near and Far 


with 250 extra illustrations, comprising 
portraits, views, plans, maps, and original 
and facsimile letters from Blank, Dash, 
Chose, and other famous persons of the 
period. Purple Levant Morocco Jan- 
senist; in watered purple silk case, gilt. 
Eiice A sréeat deal,” 

There. I am afraid I have forgotten 
the trick of the business and my friend the 
expert cataloguer will say that it is a good 
thing indeed that I have changed my trade; 
but it is something like that. Well, in- 
dexing isa horrible job; a weariness, a 
nuisance; a matter of covering the table 
with innumerable little slips of paper that 
flow over on to the floor; and one must 
be careful and accurate, and I have al- 
ways hated being careful, and accurate 
—unless I happen to be interested in 
what I am doing. Besides, I hold that 
“grangerising’ is both barbarous and 
silly. So I didn’t like my work, but I 
liked the Brothers. They were always 
most courteous. Near our establishment 
was a shop where a very old gentleman 
sold precious things. His shop windows 
were made of small squares of glass. 
Above them was an inscription to the ef- 
f 105 


Things Near and Far 


fect that the firm were “Goldsmiths and 
Silversmiths to Their Majesties the King 
and Queen and to Her Royal Highness 
the Duchess of Kent.’ And the old 
gentleman who kept this shop wore what 
we call evening-dress all day long, and aa= 
vanced to meet his customers with an in- 
clined head, his hands clasped together. 
The Brothers were a good deal younger, 
but they were of the same school. They 
had a way of putting things. For ex- 
ample, Brother Charles was trying to 
teach me how to catalogue their very 
beautiful collection of French eighteenth- 
century illustrated books, the sort of books 
that have illustrations by Fragonard. 
“And if, Mr. Machen,” said Brother 
Charles, “if it strikes you that any of 
these plates are brilliant impressions— 
well, we have no objection to your say- 
ing so.” 
It may be mentioned that the firm dealt 
occasionally in works which would not be 
suitable for the ‘‘center table’ of a New 
England parlour. For themselves, for 
their own private taste, they read George 
Eliot and thought her by far the greatest 
novelist that the English Nation had ever 
106 


Things Near and Far 


produced. I am sure that they would 
have held “Peregrine Pickle’’—-save in the 
rare first impression—to be a low book, 
and Dickens, I conjecture, would have 
struck them as funny and vulgar. But, 
still, selling books was their business, and 
it was not their affair as booksellers to cen- 
sor the morals of the works they sold. 
They dealt in rare books. 

Well, one morning as I walked down 
from Great Russell Street to the shop, I 
was reading of the trial and conviction of 
a minor bookseller of Charing Cross 
Road. This Mr. Jackson, or whatever 
his name was, had been found guilty of 
selling obscene books, and had been sent to 
gaol, for nine months, if I remember. I 
mentioned the matter to Brother Ned as I 
entered. 

“You've seen about Jackson?’ I said. 

“Yes, Mr. Machen,”’ said Brother Ned, 
with a certain moral austerity of demean- 
our that was new to me. “We have 
seen about Mr. Jackson, and we wish to 
state at once that we have no sympathy 
with Mr. Jackson; none whatever. ‘There 
is a right way, Mr. Machen, of doing 
these things and a. wrong way.” 

107 


Things Near and Far 


Mr. Jackson, I may say, did not deal in 
rare books. His prices were low, he ap- 
pealed to the general public. I hasten to 
add that on the whole I sympathise with 
the Brothers on this matter. And I add 
also: that after more recent experiences 
of mine [ am very loath to find fault with 
any persons who treat those in their em- 
ployment as human beings, with the decent 
civilities, courtesies and considerations 
that are befitting between man and man. 
In those days I had no knowledge of the 
anthropoids; still, | appreciated the pleas- 
ant treatment I received. | 

Yet, with all their pleasant manners, 
I am afraid that the Brothers did not 
find in me the ideal cataloguer. Anyhow, 
one day Brother Ned came down to my 
darksome place with a queer little quarto 
in his hand, a quarto in a dull paper 
wrapper. He had it open, marked with ~ 
a slip of paper, at a certain page, and so 
far as I remember, without any particular 
preface or explanation, he asked me to be- 
gin making a translation of the work from 
that point. I said: “Certainly, Mr. Ed- 
ward,” and began to translate without 
more ado. 

108 


Things Near and Far 


- And here I may say that my career as 
a French translator has always struck 
me as highly humorous. At the good old 
grammar school where I was educated 
and educated very well, I think that the 
headmaster thoroughly agreed with the 
boys that Foreign Languages were a silly 
game that, for various reasons, one had 
to play. Education was Latin and Greek, 
but a notion had arisen in these late days 
that one ought to learn French, and so 
there was a French master. But he wore 
neither cap nor gown, and so he was not a 
real master, and so, again, his language 
was not a real language. Therefore: 
poor M. Ménard! And I am afraid 
that he was a very bad master. If his 
authority had been supported, and if we 
had tried our best, I do not think we 
should have learned much; as it was, the 
French lessons, three times a week, were 
a farce. I knew no French when I left 
Hereford Cathedral School in 1880, that 
is, I could not have conjugated the verb 
Aimer to save my life. I had read no 
French to speak of. ‘Then, in my desola- 
tion in Clarendon Road, I had somehow 
come across “Gil Blas” and had managed, 

109 


Things Near and Far 


being interested, to get throughit. ‘Then, 
the York Street publisher had sent me 
down the sixteenth-century ‘““Heptameron”’ 
and had ordered me to translate it, and I 
did so, somehow.. And now, Brother 
Ned ordered me to translate from the 
dumpy quarto which he handed me; and 
forthwith I set about translating, not 
troubling what it was, what it was about, 
not caring two straws that I had not the 
thread of the narrative, nor worrying 
over the fact that I knew nothing whatever 
about the enigmatic “‘M.M.” or the mys- 
terjous ‘‘C.C.”’ into whose singular adven- 
tures I now plunged gaily. ‘Thus I be- 
gan the translation of the famous ‘“‘Mem- 
oirs of Casanova,” and I think the money 
balance between the Brothers and myself 
was readjusted. For if I had been dear 
as a cataloguer, at thirty shillings a week, 
I was decidedly cheap as a translator. 
Casanova is a work that runs into twelve 
sizeable volumes, and the task of turn- 
ing it into English took me a year, and 
I think the cost to the firm will be held to 
have been strictly moderate. 

And what about these strange Memoirs 

I1O 


Things Near and Far 


of the charlatan adventurer? Well, not 
long ago I was called upon to write an 
introduction to a reissue of the version I 
had made in the ’eighties. I found this 
an extremely difficult task. The obvious 
solution of the difficulty, the writing a sort 
of précis of the book and calling it an 
Introduction, did not appeal to me. It 
was some time before the ‘‘moral”’ of the 
Memoirs disengaged itself. The Intro- 
duction when written proved to be an es- 
say on the futility of trying to tell the 
whole truth about the relations between 
men and women. This is what Casanova, 
who was highly qualified, in a certain 
sense, for the undertaking, tried to do; 
and the more “frank,” the more “out- 
spoken’’ his page the more the secret es- 
capes from it; the more openly he reveals, 
the more deeply he conceals the mysteries. 
For the fact is that all the real secrets 
are ineffable; the secrets of love, and the 
secrets of the wood; the secrets of the 
flower and the secrets of the flame; and 
the secrets of the Faith. As I point out 
/in my Introduction, you can enumerate 
the scientific facts—such of them as are 
III 


Things Near and Far 


known—relating to any subject. You 
can define a horse, for example, as Bitzer 
defined it in “Hard Times.” 

‘‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. (Forty 
teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four 
eye-teeth and twelve incisive. Sheds coat 
in the spring; in marshy countries sheds 
hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring 
to be shod with iron. Age known by 
marks in mouth.” 

And so you may discourse of the pistils 
and stamens of the lilies of the field, and 
divide the fowls of the air into genera 
and species and subspecies and count the 
teeth of Keats: and when all is done, you 
know—nothing. Nothing that is of the 
essence of your matter, nothing of its 
‘“quiddity,”’ a word that we have ceased to 
use, I suppose because we have no use for 
it, having forgotten that there is such a 
thing as that essence which is present in all 
things, which indeed makes them to be 
what they are, which is nevertheless un- 
searchable and ineffable. And all this is 
true, not only of the matters which the 
plain man, the man in the street, is inclined 
to sniff at, but of all things, of man himself 
and of the universe of noumena and phe- 

112 


Things Near and Far 


nomena which is presented to him. If 
you talk to the plain, practical man about 
Mystic Theology, Mystic Love, Poetry, 
Romance, he will, very likely, brush you 
aside with his ‘In my opinion that’s all 
imagination”—and serve you right for 
talking to him on such subjects at all. 
The dear fellow has no notion of the 
fact that he has never seen a point, a line, 
a square, or a triangle, and that he never 
will see any one of these things—in this 
life at all events. He has seen black 
marks on paper which he has been told 
are lines and squares and triangles. Be- 
ing at heart thoroughly credulous, he be- 
lieves what he is told, but if he will dig up 
his old “Euclid”? and read the definitions, 
he will find that no mortal eyes can ever 
see a square or a circle, since a line is 
length without breadth and a plane sur- 
face is length and breadth without thick- 
ness. There is nothing in the nature of 
things to prevent a man from seeing a 
dragon or a griffin, a gorgon or a uni- 
corn. Nobody as a matter of fact has 
seen a woman whose hair consisted of 
snakes, nor a horse from whose forehead 
a horn projected; though very early man 


113 


Things Near and Far 


most probably did see dragons—known to 
science as pterodactyls—and monsters 
more improbable than griffins. At any 
rate, none of these zoological fancies vio- 
lates the fundamental laws of the intel- 
lect; the monsters of heraldry and mythol- 
ogy do not exist, but there is no reason 
in the nature of things nor in the laws of 
the mind why they should not exist. But 
no man hath seen a line at any time, since 
the manifestation of length without 
breadth is a contradiction in terms. And 
the plain man is probably inclined to be- 
lieve in the existence of vulgar fractions; 
he may tell you that he makes use of them 
daily in his calculations. But let him study 
the story of the race between Achilles 
and the ‘Tortoise, and note to what 
monstrous results his belief in elementary 
arithmetic inevitably conducts him; re- 
sults which are more intolerable than a 
madman’s dreams. 

And then, again, there are wider, more 
universal conceptions than anything con- 
tained in the geometry and arithmetic 
books. In a little book of mine with the 
bad title of “War and the Christian 


II4 


Things Near and Far 


Faith’’—the publisher chose the title—l 
speak thus of Space and Time: 


‘Take two insistent and unavoid- 
able examples (of the things which are 
unsearchable and indefinable), space 
and time. No man who strolls from 
his arm chair to the mantelpiece and 
watches the hands of the clock move 
round can deny the existence of either, 
since he has walked from point to 
point in one and seen the other meas- 
ured before his eyes. But as to under- 
standing space and time, what highest 
philosophy can attain to such a pitch? 
The limitless cannot so much as be im- 
agined in the mind, not imagined in a 
nightmare: but that space which you 
have traversed of some eight or ten 
feet is limitless, and must be so. 

“It is a sea without a shore. And 
time, that which your two-guinea clock 
ticks off for you, as you watch the dial: 
it had no beginning that you can picture; 
it can have no end save with God. You 
cannot understand; you must believe; 
and so on your very hearth-rug the in- 


1 Os 


Things Near and Far 


finites and eternities are before you and 
confront you, as truly as the clock face 
confronts you.” 


And the conclusion of the whole matter 
is that we live and move in a world of 
profound and ineffable mystery; that all 
things from the most abstract to the 
most concrete are involved in this mys- 
tery, and, therefore, that Casanova as an 
exponent of love is a futile fellow. He 
was a Voltairean; he approached the ques- 
tion as he would say without prejudices, 
as the foolish among us would say, with- 
out any nonsense, or, as the still more fool- 
ish among us would say, in a scientific 
spirit. And the result is exactly what 
might be expected: nothing. Love is de- 
fined and expounded in the spirit of 
Bitzer defining a horse; and one perceives 
that science misapplied is just gibberish, 
nothing more or less. Otherwise, tak- 
ing Casanova’s Memoirs from a lower 
standpoint, they are in many places vastly 
entertaining. He knew all Europe from 
Petersburg and Constantinople to London 
and Madrid; he was familiar with the pal- 
ace and the gutter; he was the friend of 


116 


Things Near and Far 


Kings and philosophers and popes—and 
also of the scum of the eighteenth-century 
earth. One cannot understand the pe- 
riod as a whole without knowing Casa- 
nova. 

So I translated and translated day after 
day; but in a few months’ time the black 
hole in which I worked began very vio- 
lently to disagree with me. I got ill, and 
it was clear that some change must be 
made. The Brothers, as always, were 
courteous and considerate: why not do the 
work at home? [I assented very willingly, 
worked at the task for five hours every 
day, and every Saturday took my parcel of 
copy to the shop and got my thirty shil- 
lings, the week’s wages. 

And here I must make a boast, which 
is not wholly a boast: the second part of 
this sentence I shall explain no farther. 
I finished the translation of the Memoirs, 
but the book was not immediately issued. 
On the completion of my job the Brothers 
needed me no more. I imagine that they 
wanted a real, expert, technical cataloguer, 
not a literary man of sorts; and my hav- 
ing worked for them for some months at 
my own home and not in the shop made 


117 


Things Near and Far 


it easy for them to get rid of me quietly; 
rather, to let me fade away, without the 
least suspicion of firmness, much less of 
harshness. And they were always very 
glad to see me when I chose to look them 
up, either on business or merely ‘as a 
friendly caller. I remember, for example, 
that when I had finished the translation 
of “Le Moyen de Parvenir’’ and was 
‘subscribing’ the book with ‘“‘the trade,” 
I called at the shop and was received with 
a genial and kindly courtesy that I have 
not forgotten, though it is a long time 
since 1890; but then I do not forget. 
And lest it should be suspected by some 
persons that under a veil of benignity I am 
‘‘getting at’ the Brothers all the time, I 
hasten to say that this is not so; to say 
this in the strongest manner possible. 
True, thirty shillings a week was not good 
pay for decent French-English translat- 
ing, even in 1889; but it was the wages 
that I had asked myself, having been 
thoroughly convinced by my experiences 
of the six preceding years that I was such 
a dismal and incapable ass that if I just 
managed to escape the Governorship of 
the Island of Farre Joyaunce—otherwise 
118 


Things Near and Far 


the ditch or the workhouse—it was as 
much as I could expect. So I asked my 
thirty shillings a week and hoped in my 
heart that it was not too much; and I am 
not blaming the Brothers in the least be- 
cause they did not press more upon me. 
And, however that may be, they were 
always courteous and kindly in all com- 
munications that passed between us; and 
for that they shall be in my grateful mem- 
ory solongasI live. I have said already, 
I think, how once during the last year of 
my employment on the ‘‘Evening News,”’ 
finding myself in old haunts of long ago, 
Wellington Street, Bow Street, York 
Street, anguish possessed me as I re- 
membered how I had once starved and 
had known something like happiness 
while I toiled over the ancient occult 
books in the Catherine Street garret; an- 
guish possessed me as I recollected the 
happy time in misery. And, as I said to 
a friend soon afterwards: “In those days 
I was getting considerably less money in 2 
whole year than I am now getting in a 
months and. yete nn. 

Again, I say, if our clergy would but 
mind their business. If instead of en- 


119 


Things Near and Far 


quiring into the exact cut of bodices, in- 
stead of passing anxious hours as to the 
pernicious corruptions of the Fox-Trot and 
the Bunny Hug, instead of working with 
all their hearts and souls to make sure that 
no one can possibly get a glass of bitter 
beer after ten o'clock, instead of unmask- 
ing the inferno of the race-course, the 
utter levity of much of our railway litera- 
ture; if, instead of all this accursed drivel, 
cant and imbecility, they would but say 
Mass and preach the Gospel, and other- 
wise quite abide in peace! Let them go 
to the Book, and there they will find that 
the most horrible sin denounced in 
it is neither gambling, drinking nor wan- 
toning, but the sin of shaming a man, of 
bitterly insulting him, of making him mean 
in his own eyes, of making him despise 
his own self as something unutterably 
fouled and scorned and bewrayed. What 
is the text? Something like: but he that 
sayeth to his brother, ‘Thou fool,” shall 
be in danger of hell fire. 

I am drawing a contrast between 1889 
and 1921, and hence I say that the 
Brothers always treated me with the com- 
mon decency due from one human being 

120 


Things Near and Far 


to another, though they were rich and I 
was poor, though they were men of busi- 
ness and I an idiot in all matters of busi- 
ness, though they were masters and I was 
man. 

And now as to the famous boast. As 
I said, I ceased to be in the employment 
of these good men. I went into the coun- 
try, up on the Chiltern Hills. We neither 
saw nor heard anything of each other. 
But all the while those legacies of which 
I have spoken came dropping slow, and 
in 1893, when I had made up my mind 
to return to London, I think I must have 
had in bank something between three and 
four thousand pounds. I was assailed 
by an unworthy pang of prudence, by one 
of the foolish notions that the world’s 
people take for wisdom. It struck me 
that this living on capital, taking 
the pieces of eight by the fistfuls out of 
the chest, would never do; that the money 
ought to be invested, preferably in some 
business in which IJ could contribute work 
as well as money. I looked about me, I 
advertised, I saw some people in the City 
and found nothing promising from my 
point of view, though I found here and 

I2]T 


Things Near and Far 


there such curiosities as London, I be- 

lieve, only affords. /For example, in a 
very dim sort of cock-loft in an old house 
in the heart of the City, I hit upon a firm 
of general agents who had answered my 
advertisement. [here were two of them: 
One, a young, rosy, out-in-the-open sort 
of man, the other elderly, frock-coated, 
with a kind of dissenting beard on his 
chin. He talked of the version of Hor- 
ace’s odes that he was shortly bringing out 
at his own expense, and discussed with 
me the true pronunciation of the Latin 
language with much intelligence. The 
junior partner’s talk was of trawling, and 
indeed he said that the firm was a sort of 
trawling concern—in City waters. 

But nothing came of it, and at last I 
bethought me of the Brothers. Brother 
Charles was as genial as ever. He saw 
my point. He said: “We are going to 
issue Casanova at last; why not put a 
thousand pounds into that for a start?” 
I agreed, and the matter was settled. 
And then, very nervously, with a good 
deal of hesitation, with a certain difficulty 
in the choice of words, Brother Charles 
said: 

122 


Things Near and Far 


“Of course, Mr. Machen, we quite 


recognise the . . . er . . . circumstances 
in which you made your most admirable 
translation of the book. It was... er 
meee sar Manner.) 4 era neal ASK 
work; yes, task-work. Well... the 


base isiinow, to a certain. depree!.).% 
altered; you have an interest in the pros- 
perity of the venture, and, in short, we 
rather wondered whether you would like 
fOr. htO. . |. revise your manuscript.” 

Pivire Gharies, 1 ireplied) ‘IY did; the 
job as well as I could; and I don’t think 
mecan, make it'‘any better’ 


123 


Chapter VII 


proved to be what the elder 

members of the theatrical profes- 
sion used to call “a pill.”’ Only the other 
day I was reading a French account of 
this author. The critic said in the course 
of his remarks that many people who 
had gone to the ‘Moyen de Parvenir”’ 
in search of unpleasantness had turned 
back from the quest, deterred by the dif- 
ficulty of the language. And I don't 
know that it is more difficult for a modern- 
Frenchman than for an Englishman. It 
is written in a sort of Babylonish dialect 
which is not exactly French though it 
looks like it; as much as Meredith looks 
like English to the casual glance. And 
then, it is not only difficult, but obscure; 
not only are the sentences queerly con- 
structed, but the subject-matter is of a 
highly dubious and cloudy character: 
when you have found out what Beroalde is 


124 


B, reved DE VERVILUE 


Things Near and Far 


saying, you begin to wonder what he is 
saying it about. And, then, there are bits 
of old dialect peppered about this ex- 
cessively odd volume. I remember com- 
ing upon two words: “‘iquent hesne.”’ 
I sat down in front of them, and looked 
at them from every angle. I don’t know 
how I found out at last that “‘iquent hesne’”’ 
was a sort of seventeenth-century French 
“Zummerzet” for ‘‘cette chéene’—“thicky 
oak.” Again the “Moyen”’ is thick with 
puns, of the kind that used to be called 
in the golden days of Burlesque “out- 
rageous’: and the time I wasted in trying 
to turn these silly French tricks into sil- 
lier English contortions! On the whole, 
I would say that “‘Le Moyen de Parvenir”’ 
in literature is as a cathedral constructed 
entirely of gargoyles would be in archi- 
tecture. Rabelais is full of gargoyles, 
‘apes and owls and antics,’ as he calls 
them, on the outside of the jar. But 
within, as he rightly claims, there are 
precious medicines, aromatic balms of 
singular power and virtue. And so far 
as I can judge, Beroalde is all oddity and 
nothing else. He cost me a year’s hard 
labour; the version was issued and is now 
125 


Things Near and Far 


valued by collectors; and that is all that 
need be said. 

And now—in 1890—I began to try 4 
little journalism of the more or less liter- 
ary kind. I began, I think, by writing 
“Turnovers” for the ‘‘Globe,’’ and mis- 
cellaneous articles for the “St. James’s 
Gazette,’ and at length stories for the 
latter paper, which was then edited by 
Mr.—now Sir—Sydney Lowe. ‘The 
‘‘Globe”’ is extinct, the ‘St. James’s Ga- 
zette’’ is merged and submerged in the 
‘Evening Standard”; there are no papers 
of such metal now in existence. ‘The 
difference between them and the evening 
papers of the day is a very simple one: 
the former were meant to please the edu- 
cated, the latter are designed to entertain 
the uneducated, and the uneducated may 
be equated, very largely indeed, with 
women. It is an odd paradox: there is 
no doubt, I suppose, that the instruction 
—or, if you like, education—of women 
has made immense strides in the last thirty 
years; and yet it is true that when a news- 
paper editor says to himself: ‘We have 
an immense number of women readers 
and we must see that they get what they 

126 


Things Near and Far 


like,” the result is drivel. This sort of 
thing: 


Madame has just discovered a new 
craze. Jewelled clay pipes and shag 
tobacco delicately sprinkled with gold- 
dust are now quite démodés when once 
we cross the borders of Balham; but 
my lady prides herself on her collection 
of hookahs, the water-pipes of the gor- 
geous East. 


It is quite the thing, I hear, amongst 
really smart women to give “Hookah 
Teas.” Everybody wears Oriental 
costume, and sits on cushions piled on 
the floor, and delicately draws in the 
aroma of the rarest Turkish Tobacco, 
scented by its passage through rose- 
water or lavender-water. At Lady 
Clarinda Belsize’s Hookah Tea last 
Wednesday, two native musicians 
played the tom-tom and the guzla be- 
hind a curtain, or purdah, as I am told 
it is called. Of course yashmaks were 
worn by all the guests. 


There; it is not worth parodying. And 
there is another sort of terrible tosh which 
127 


Things Near and Far 


deals with the doings of ‘“‘The Summer 
Girl” and ‘“The Winter Girl” and “The 
Marathon Girl’: all of it a very feeble 
imitation of the cheapest American jour- 
nalism. In the ’nineties this kind of thing 
existed, but it was confined to the columns 
of one or two ladies’ papers. In those 
days, I would not say that the editors of 
evening papers brought out their journals 
exclusively for the benefit of the members 
of the best clubs of St. James’s and Pall 
Mall; but I certainly should say that they 
had the clubs in their mind’s eye; that they 
presumed a certain standard of education 
and culture in their readers. All that 
ended when the evening ‘Westminster 
Gazette’ came to an end. 

But indeed there would be little harm 
done if a column or two columns or three 
columns were reserved for the ‘Hookah 
Tea” ‘stuff and the “Caravan Girl” stu 
and all similar stuff. You could skip 
these columns if you didn’t like them, just 
as I skip the racing columns in which I 
am not interested. But ‘“‘the women’’ 
rule the whole paper. Not only must the 
editor put in matter which he knows they 
will like, he must keep out matter which 

128 


Things Near and Far 


he knows they won’t like. And the re- 
sultis . . . the result as we knowit. As 
the “literary editor’ of a big London 
paper acutely observed to me not long 
ago, the case of the newspaper article is 
exactly as the case of chops and steaks, 
beefsteak puddings and saddles of mutton 
that were of old. “The women” have 
spoilt all. What do they know or care 
about man’s food? ‘To them there is noth- 
ing to choose between a chop fried white 
and hard and greasy in the frying-pan and 
a chop which has been purged of all greas- 
iness by the ardent heat beneath the grid- 
iron, which beneath a coat half black, 
half golden-brown preserves its delicious 
juices, which sizzles on the plate as Wil- 
liam or Charles serves it, which, opened 
by the eager knife, shews within a hue 
like that of a blush-rose in June. These 
are not matters to enchant the wayward 
heart of a young girl, and when once she 
sets foot inside the tavern coffee-room, 
farewell to all such solid merits. There 
was once a famous tavern called Her- 
bert’s, famous for two generations. 
Men who had spent half a lifetime in 
Africa or India or in the islands of the 
129 


Things Near and Far 


South Seas were sustained by the thought 
of the beefsteak pudding at Herbert's. 
The times changed and the old tavern 
with them. Going there in these later 
days, I used to wonder why all the meats 
seemed to taste alike, why there was no 
distinctive and peculiar relish about any 
of the dishes. I found out the reason why 
one day. I had business, oddly enough, 
in Herbert’s kitchen. One of the cooks 
shewed me the joints roasting on the jack; 
and I perceived that three different meats 
were cooking at the one fire, while be- 
neath, in a common pan, their juices 
mingled, ready for the basting ladle. It 
is not much wonder, I think, that veal 
and lamb and beef taste all much alike 
in this unhappy place, once so high, now 
fallen so low. One night I was dining ~ 
there, and a member of the party asked 
the waiter to bring him some Stilton. “I 
beg your pardon, sir,” said the man, “we 
only have English cheeses.” It sounds 
impossible; but I heard this with my ears. 
In the old days Herbert’s was exclusively 
masculine in its custom; I do not know 
what would have happened to that waiter 
130 


Things Near and Fur 
then. I hardly think that his death would 


have been an easy one. 

But to ‘‘the women” all this is of 
no account. They know nothing about 
man’s food, as I say, and they care less. 
I do not blame them; I do not blame my- 
self for being ignorant of the difference 
between Hopsac and Gaberdine: but how 
would they like it if I poked my nose into 
their Oxford Street shops and insisted on 
these shops being carried on to suit my 
taste? 

So through this monstrous incursion of 
women, with the war and the nursery 
hours of to-day, the old tavern life has 
gone; utterly and for ever, I am afraid. 
A good thing has gone. ‘The old mahog- 
any boxes with bright brass work and 
green curtains, the light twinkling in the 
dark polished surfaces that were all about 
the room, the flaming fire with the plates 
warming by it, the plain food, the best 
of its kind, cooked in the best possible 
manner, the mighty tankards of mighty 
ale, the port that was port afterwards, in 
itself a great gift and a curious grace, 
and later—say about eleven o’clock— 


131 


| 
} 
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Things Near and Far 


Charles appearing with a large china bowl 
and a bottle under his arm, following up 
these things with lump sugar, lemons, and 
the hot water: it is all over. And it is 
not only the good material things that 
have been taken away: the good meats 
and the good drinks, the glowing mahog- 
any and the cheerful blaze and crackle of 
the fire: with them has gone, I suspect, 
a certain genial habit of the mind and 
soul which was congruous with all the 
circumstances of the old-fashioned tavern, 
which was congruous also with good men 
and good books and choice poetry, with 
all the rich zest and relish and unction 
which made the Victorian age of letters a 
great age; and, in its measure, a worthy 
successor to three other illustrious tavern 
ages: the Shakespearean, the Caroline, 
and the Jonsonian. Think of Falstaff 
and his tavern bill and his warning against 
thin potations, think of Herrick and his 
address to Ben, his fond remembrance 
of the taverns “‘where we such clusters 
had as made us nobly wild not mad,” 
think of Jonson squeezing the orange into 
the bowl “with antic gestures, saying 
‘Who's for poonsh?” think of Tennyson 
132 


Things Near and Far 


and that blest pint of port at the vanished 
Cock Tavern, think of Dickens, that great 
lover of tavern feasts and immortaliser 
of them: think of all this, my poor young 
man, and beat your breast. ‘There are 
no jolly taverns for you, and your fa- 
vourite authors do not write like men— 
“my son Cartwright writes all like a 
man,’ said Ben Jonson—but like psycho- 
analytical chemists. 

And as I was saying, as with taverns, 
so with the papers. When I wrote a 
little for them, in 1890 or thereabouts, it 
was allowable to assume a certain amount 
of literacy, a certain knowledge in the 
reader. Now that is over. I know the 
case of a man who, [ am certain, pretends 
ignorance that he may continue to be em- 

ployed. As it happens, he is an expert 
in food and drink; but I have known him 
number Beaujolais with the wines of 
Bordeaux in a newspaper article, and 
speak of curry powder and pickles as or- 
dinary ingredients in veal and ham pie. 
I believe he knows much better; but he 
has probably found out that a misstate- 
ment or two gives an easy careless air 
that is much admired. Nobody can call 


133 


Things Near and Far 


a writer of this kind a pedant. A highly 
accomplished journalist said to me a few 
years ago: “Always remember that we 
appeal, not to the cabman, but to the cab- 
man’s wife.’ And another instance, 
though I am afraid it is somewhat tinged 
with self-praise. I had written a brief 
article for the ‘“Evening News” on a topic 
that had been given to me; I was to ex- 
plain why it is that a ‘“‘mean street” of 
to-day is, generally, hideous and appalling, 
while a row of sixteenth-century cottages 
is, generally, a delight to see. I did as 
I always do when I can, I took the partic- 
ular instance and placed it under a gen- 
eral principle. I said the chief horror 
of the modern street was not to be sought 
in the poverty of the design, though that 
was, doubtless, bad enough, but in the 
fact that in the street of to-day each house 
is a replica of the other, so that the 
effect to the eye is, if the street be long 
enough, the prolongation of one house to 
infinity, in an endless series of repetitions. 
And I pointed out that even if you ad- 
mired some particular picture or statue 
immensely, it would be rather awful to 
traverse a long gallery in which the pic- 


134 


Things Near and Far 


ture or the statue were repeated again 
and again as far as the eye could see. 
And then, on the other hand, I shewed 
how the sixteenth-century cottages were 
each of them individuals, each with some 
slight difference from the cottage next 
door, each with its variety in door or win- 
dow or pent-house. And hence, I urged, 
a continual slight surprise to the beholder, 
and taking the supposed row as a whole, 
that strangeness in the proportion which 
Bacon declared, most profoundly, to be 
necessary to the highest beauty. Well, I 
got this with difficulty into the prescribed 
500 words—*"nobody will read anything 
over 500 words’—and said to myself: 
‘‘Now that Patmore is dead, nobody else 
could have written that article. But 

. there will be a row.” There was. 
Lord Northcliffe gave the little essay the 
honour of a special mention in one of his 
famous communiqués—as I believe they 
were called. He spoke of it with venom 
was ‘‘a wiseacre article.’’ J am sure he 
was perfectly right from his point of 
view. The fault was mine. ‘When I 
am in Rome, I fast on Saturdays,” said 
one of the Fathers. 


135 


Things Near and Far 


Things have changed indeed. I was 
mentioning Coventry Patmore. In the 
Introduction to the “Religio Poetz,” a 
collection of short essays of the profound- 
est wisdom, he acknowledges his obliga- 
tions to Greenwood, once editor of the 
“St. James’s Gazette.” Some of these 
essays had appeared in that journal: the 
fact is quite stupefying considered in the 
light of the journalism of to-day. Edu- 
cation increases; ignorance grows deeper. 


Let me not be understood as claiming 
that my newspaper work of thirty-two 
years ago was characterised by the pro- 
foundest wisdom. Very far from it; my 
articles were harmless and agreeable 
enough, I think, in a small way; and writ- 
ing them, I first began to get a hint of my 
true subject; the country of my childhood 
and my youth. And I thus began to move 
away from the exotic Rabelaisian influence, 
both as to manner and to matter: to per- 
ceive that not the splendid Loire but the 
humble Soar brook, winding and shining 
in deep valleys and obscured by dark 
alder thickets, was my native stream. I[ 
began to see that I was a citizen of Caer- 


136 


Things Near and Far 


leon-on-Usk, and not of Tours or of 
Chinon, and that the old grey manor- 
houses and the white farms of Gwent had 
their beauty and significance, though they 
were not castles in Touraine. There was 
something of all this, of course, in “The 
Chronicle of Clemendy,” the Great Ro- 
mance which was neither great nor a ro- 
mance; but in this everything was viewed 
and everything expressed in an exotic 
medium: now I saw that a blossoming 
thorn bush in the valley of the Soar and 
the nightingale singing in it and the river 
level about Caerleon and the red fires of 
sunset over the mountain in the west were 
all in themselves and by themselves fit 
matter for the work; that they needed not 
to be disguised in a French literary habit 
of four hundred years ago. 

It was in this summer of 1890 that I 
wrote the first chapter of “The Great 
God Pan.” I have told the whole story 
in the Introduction to the latest edition 
of that fantasy, which is published by 
Messrs. Simpkin, Marshall, and whether 
I should weary my readers I know not, 
but I do know that I should weary myself 
if I told it all over again. The tale was 


135i 


} 
} 


Things Near and Far 


written in bits, in the intervals between 
severe literary cramps, as I have men- 
tioned in this present volume, and it was 
published by Mr. John Lane, of the Bod- 
ley Head, at the end of 1894, when yel- 
low bookery was at its yellowest. And 
it aroused a certain amount of attention. 
There was a storm—in a doll’s teacup. 

The other day a friend of mine said 
genially to me: 


“T have just been reading that ‘Great 
God Pan’ of yours over again, and I 
really don’t see that there’s much in it 
to make a sensation of.”’ 


I am sure he was quite right. But a 
sensation there was, of a minor kind. It 
had some mysterious property in it, this 
little book, which caused good men to 
froth at the mouth, greatly to my delight. 
I have quoted a good many of the re- 
views in the Introduction to the Simpkin, 
Marshall edition: things like this: 


‘We are afraid he only succeeds in 
being ridiculous. The book is, on the 
whole, the most acutely and intention- 
ally disagreeable we have yet seen in 

138 


Things Near and Far 


English. We could say more, but re- 
frain from doing so for fear of giving 
such a work advertisement.’’—‘‘Man- 
chester Guardian.” 


‘This book is gruesome, ghastly, and 
dull . . . the majority of readers will 
turn from it in utter disgust.”— 
“Lady’s Pictorial.” 


‘These tricks have also their ludi- 
crous side.’’—‘‘Guardian.”’ 


And so forth. It is very well, but I 
cannot help saying, as an old craftsman 
and an old reviewer, that it might have 
been better. I have no fault to find with 
the technique of 'the “Guardian’’; but the 
‘“‘Lady’s Pictorial” should have left out 
the “gruesome” and the “ghastly” and 
also, I am inclined to think, the “disgust.” 
There are readers who like the gruesome 
and the ghastly; there are readers whose 
curiosity is stimulated by the term ‘‘dis- 
gust.’ I am afraid, for example, that if 
the account of legal proceedings, civil or 
criminal, is headed “Disgusting Details,” 
there are minds so prurient as to be rather 
attracted than repelled, and I am sure 
that the gentle scribe of the “Lady’s Pic- 


139 


} 


Things Near and Par 


torial’’ did not wish to paint my little book 
in attractive colours. And so with the 
“Manchester Guardian.’ ‘Ridiculous’ 
is admirable; but ‘“‘acutely and intention- 
ally disagreeable” is something of a signal 
set to attract those prurient readers whose 
existence I have regretted; and the last 
sentence says too much. Mr. Harry 
Quilter, something of a figure in those 
days, did better. He pointed out in an 
article in the ““Contemporary Review’ — 
also something of a figure in those days— 
that the only explanation he could give 
of such favourable notices as the book 
had received was that the author must 
have a great many friends engaged in 
journalism. I wrote a temperate letter 
to Mr. Quilter in which I said I was very 
sorry, but I didn’t know any journalists 
at all—which happened to be the truth. 
He wrote back to remind me, as he said, 
that there was ‘‘an Inmost Light to which 
you may yet be true’—''The Inmost 
Light” is the title of a tale which was 
included in the first edition of “The 
Great God Pan.” 

One of the saddest books in the world 
is Mrs. Gaskell’s wonderful ‘Life of 

140 


Things Near and Far 


Charlotte Bronté.” But there is one 
tragi-comical touch. Poor valiant, sim- 
ple, stricken Charlotte was being enter- 
tained in town by Mr. and Mrs. Smith. 
There was a dinner-party, given, I sup- 
pose, in her honour, and she writes to an 
old friend: 

“There were only seven gentlemen at 
dinner besides Mr. Smith, but of these 
five were critics—men more dreaded in 
the world of letters than you can conceive. 
I did not know how much their presence 
and conversation had excited me till they 
were gone, and the reaction commenced. 
When I had retired for the night, I 
wished to sleep—the effort to do so was 
vain. I could not close my eyes. Night 
passed; morning came, and I rose with- 
out having known a moment’s slumber.” 

Who were these terrible five? We do 
not know, and it is possible enough that if 
we heard their names we should not have 
heard of their names, though, likely 
enough, George Henry Lewes was one of 
them. It is odd and pathetic too to think 
that a great woman such as Charlotte 
Bronté should have allowed the brilliant 
repartees and tremendous reputation of 


I41 


Things Near and Far 


George Henry Lewes to break her rest. 
And just before this passage there is an- 
other, as strange and as pathetic. A 
severe review of ‘Shirley’ appeared in 
“The: Times.””). Mr. and: Mrs Smita 
kindly “mislaid” the paper. But Char- 
lotte insisted on pressing the thorn to her 
bosom. She would see ‘The Times.” 


“Mrs. Smith took her work, and 
tried not to observe the countenance, 
which the other tried to hide between 
the huge sheets; but she could not help 
becoming aware of tears stealing down 
the face and dropping on the lap.” 


And all over a review, an unfavourable 
review! It is very strange, or, at least, 
it seems so to me, since, like Jim the 
nigger, I don’t never cry ska’sely over 
reviews, and I have always contrived to 
get’ my usual sleep. 

But I have left out one curious speci- 
men of the ‘‘Great God Pan’’ reviews, a 
specimen which leads up to a curious pas- 
sage. The ‘Westminster Review” said: 


“Tt is an incoherent nightmare of 
sex and the supposed horrible mysteries 
142 


Things Near and Far 


behind it, such as might conceivably 
possess a man who was given to a mot- 
bid brooding over these matters, but 
which would soon lead to insanity if 
unrestrained . . . innocuous from its 
absurdity.” 


I was talking over old literary doings 
and the affairs of the ‘nineties with a 
friend one day in the spring of 1921. 
My friend was asking me about my early 
books and their reception. I gave him 
a lurid account of the castigations which 
I had received on account of ‘“The Great 
God Pan.” 

“Why,” said I, “the ‘Westminster’ 
practically told me that if I didn’t take 
care I should end up in a lunatic asylumn.” 

“Well,” replied the man, meaning to be 
funny, “haven’t you? I understood you 
were at Carmelite House ?”’ 

“No,” I returned, also meaning to be 
funny, “I haven't. All the lunatic asy- 
lums that I’ve heard of have been man- 
aged by a doctor.” 


During the latter part of my stay in 
the country (1891-93) I wrote two books. 


143 


Things Near and Far 


I have forgotten the names of both of 
them. ‘They were very bad, and I tore 
them up, with the exception of one epi- 
sode—to put it mildly, not a very good 
story—which appears in “The Three Im- 
postors” under the title of “The Novel 
of the Dark Valley.’ And it was in the 
early spring of 1894 that I set about the 
writing of the said ‘Three Impostors,” 
a book which testifies to the vast respect. 
I entertained for the fantastic, ‘‘New 
Arabian Nights” manner of R. L. Steven- 
son, to those curious researches in the by- 
ways of London which I have described 
already, and also, I hope, to a certain 
originality of experiment in the tale of 
terror, as exemplified in the stories of 
the Professor who was taken by the 
fairies, and of the young student of law 
who swallowed the White Powder. And 
when I had finished, with a sort of recog- 
nition that I had squeezed this particular 
orange to death, I remember saying to my 
old friend A. E. Waite: “I shall never 
give anybody a White Powder again.” 
And then I was immediately called on to 
do that very thing which I had vowed I 
would not do. I actually got an “order,” 


144 


Things Near and Far 


and—this shews that I was a mere in- 
truder, not a true craftsman—I have 
rarely been so miserable, miserable that 
is, as a man of letters, in my life. 

It was like this. As I have remarked, 
‘The Great God Pan” had made a storm 
in a Tiny Tot’s teacup. And about the 
same time, a young gentleman named 
H. G. Wells had made a very real, and 
a most deserved sensation with a book 
called ‘‘The Time Machine’; a book in- 
deed. And a new weekly paper was pro- 
jected by Mr. Raven Hill and Mr. Girdle- 
stone, a paper that was to be called “The 
Unicorn.”’ And both Mr. Wells and my- 
self were asked to contribute; I was to do 
a series of horror stories. I won’t deny 
that I swelled a little and was cheered 
and elated by the fact of my being asked 
to write by anybody; nay, I really tried 
my best to feel important and puffed up. 
And then I set about writing that series 
of tales of horror. I was not puffed up 
for long. As I say, I had realised that 
for me the Stevensonian manner was 
ended. And now I was to begin all over 
again; to recook that cabbage which was 
already boiled to death! I wrote four 


145 


Things Near and Far 


stories in a kind of agony, my pen shriek- 
ing “rubbish!” at me with every stroke. 
I remember literally sobbing in a kind of 
hysteria of despair with my head on my 
hands; and this shews that there are some 
men who cannot be helped. The only 
thing that got me through at all was an 
endeavour to transplant the manner of 
Apuleius into English soil; but the four 
tales were sorry things when all was said. 
I was glad when “The Unicorn’ ceased 
to exist after two or three numbers, be- 
fore a single one of those tales of mine 
had appeared in it. Mr. Wells had one 
story in “The Unicorn,’ “The Cones 
which he reprinted in the collection called 
“The Country of the Blind.” Such was 
the affair, and I think it explains the irri- 
tation which I have always experienced 
when I have been asked to write a contin- 
uation of “The Three Impostors,” or 
something in the manner of ‘‘The Three 
Impostors.” I knew that all this was 
done and ended; that, for me, the vein 
was worked out and exhausted: utterly. 
I shall always recur to the metaphor of 
the white road that you see from afar 
climbing over the hill into unconjectured 
146 


Things Near and Far 


regions. _For me that is literature; the. 
journey of discovery; the finding of a new 
world. When once I have toiled pain- 
fully up that long road, and have stood 
on the other side of the dark wood, and 
have looked upon the land beyond; then 
all the joy, all the delight and thrill 
and wonder are over for me. Columbus 
could not discover America twice. I 
never can say to myself: ‘Look here! 
Let’s pretend that we’ve never been this 
way before, that we don’t know in the 
least what’s beyond that turn of the road, 
that anything may happen beyond that 
pine tree.’’ It won't do. 

And that is one reason why I beg my 
bread in my sixtieth year. 

For, all that I have written on this mat- 
ter is, doubtless, very fine; but we must 
confess that when it is a case of literature 
being exchanged for the money of the 
publisher—and the public—the affair be- 
comes a commercial one. And, in busi- 
ness, you buy a brand. Let me try to 
imagine it! I am a wealthy man, and I 
have found and my guests have found 
that last hamper of Champagne admir- 
able. I go to my wine merchant and 


147 


Things Near and Far 


order another hamper of the same vin- 
tage. Nay, he has not got it; he will be 
happy to supply me with a wine of entirely 
different character; or, to press the anal- 
ogy a little extravagantly, he no longer 
deals in Champagne at all, he doesn’t 
think much of Champagne, it is an elegant 
lemonade, as one of Murger’s characters 
expresses it, but he will be delighted to 
send me six dozen of a rare Chateau wine 
of Bordeaux, an infinitely finer wine, as 
he assures me. But I want Champagne! 
[ am not going to stand such treatment 
for one moment! The man must be 
mad! De me fabula narratur; all my 
life I have been pressing my Bordeaux 
on people who had begun to think that 
there might be something to be said for 
my small Champagne. 

And I quite see the point. I have 
never read one of the horror stories of 
Mr. W. W. Jacobs, though I am told that 
they are admirable. For me, Mr. Jacobs 
must speak through an everlasting Night 
Watchman through an eternal country- 
man draining the last dregs of his beer on 
the settle at the Cauliflower: with these 
immortals I am happy. 

148 


Things Near and Far 


‘The Three Impostors”’ was published 
by John Lane some time in 1895. , But 
before sending the manuscript to Mr. 
Lane, I had tried Mr. Heinemann. The 
firm wrote me a most delightful letter, 
full of the most charming things, which I 
had some difficulty in swallowing, though 
an author’s throat is capable of astound- 
ing feats where praise is concerned. I 
was to go and see them, and I did so, my 
heart beating high. I saw a member of 
the firm. He was better than the letter 
for a swelling soul. He read extracts 
from the reader’s report, and these were 
more splendid still. He outlined delight- 
ful terms; he pressed on me the necessity 
of my having something on account of 
royalties in advance: a happy possibility 
that had not even dawned on me in 1894— 
95. He hoped that the House of Heine- 
mann might ever have the privilege of 
publishing my beautiful books. ‘Better 
than the best of Stevenson’; thus he read 
from the optimistic reader’s report. 
Thus elated, glorious, happy indeed, went 
down Mr. Arthur Machen, man of letters 
—now there could be no doubt of it!— 
from the amiable office, even into Bed- 


149 


Things Near and Far 


ford Street, seen for the first time to be a 
shining thoroughfare, a veritable golden 
pathway of Paradise, leading to the 
golden Strand, nay, to the golden world, 
where all desires were accomplished, and 
the faithful servant is rewarded: ‘Enter 
thou into the joy of thy Publisher.” 

After all, I said to myself, the old toils, 
the old labours, those unhappy nights, 
those sick days of despair were not alto- 
gether wasted. Indeed, I tried to do my 
best; indeed, I grudged no labour; indeed, 
I was patient and tore up the sorry page; 
I knew that I must persevere and still per- 
severe. And I knew that the other books 
were well meant but futile after all; that 
I had not really touched the mark, though 
I pretended that I had, and did my best 
to persuade myself that it was so. But 
now; “I have really written something 
that is good, that is, even, very good; 
that one of the best publishers in London 
praises and praises highly.” I never 
thought of the money that all this must 
mean, that never entered a moment into 
my mind; my only meditation was that 
for fifteen years I had done all I could 
do, and that now I was to enter into my 

150 


Things Near and Far 


reward. O golden Strand, that day, 
golden Great Russell Street when I came 
home to tell my news, golden happy world 
which rewards at last all humble faithful 
endeavour: golden world inhabitated by 
good men, by publishers of all men most 
good. 

It was a pure matter of form; the 
waiting for the agreement, a matter of 
a week or so, as the kind gentlemen in 
the office informed me. And in three 
weeks, somewhere about the middle of 
January, 1895, came the MS. of “The 
Three Impostors’’ back to me, with a for- 
mal, printed slip from the House of 
Heinemann, regretting that it was unable 
to accept the enclosed manuscript. Well 
does A. E. Waite declare that there is an 
element of waggery in the constitution of 
the universe. Never did the proud 
policeman in the old pantomime, foiled 
by the buttered slide of the clam, come 
down with a thump so_ boisterously 
undignified. So, rolling in the mud, I 
lay sprawling, my legs in the air. I was 
silly enough to write a somewhat exas- 
perated letter to my friend in the office. 
He answered me in a befitting manner, in 


I51 


Things Near and Far 
a tone of grave rebuke: he said that if I 
had realised the cares of the publisher’s 
life I would not have written “so causti- 


ree Os 


Chapter VIII 


a HE Three Impostors’’ came 
back then from Messrs. Heine- 
mann, and as soon as I got 

over the little bump I have just mentioned, 
I thought that I would try to make the 
book a bit better. One of the “novels”’ 
or introduced tales displeased me, so lI 
am sure it must have been very bad in- 
deed. JI am not certain but I think it 
was about a benevolent City man, of 
considerable means, who occupied an old 
red brick house somewhere at the back 
of Acton and occasionally, I suppose at 
the full moon, turned into a were-wolf. 
I can see nothing against the plot; and I 
believe there is a considerable body of 
unimpeachable evidence in favour of the 
hypothesis that the human consciousness 
is occasionally displaced by the bestiai 
consciousness : the Malays, for instance, 
are apt at times to fancy themselves wild 
cats and to behave accordingly. But, 


Se, 


Things Near and Far 


somehow, it wouldn’t do. ‘he trans- 
formation of the City man was highly un- 
satisfactory and unconvincing: so I tore 
up the tale, and wrote instead of it the 
surprising narrative of Professor Gregg 
and his disastrous search for the fairies 
among the hills of my native country. In 
the machinery of the story I introduced a 
hypothesis that was then new; I think 1] 
read of it in some paper written by Sir 
Oliver Lodge. The theory was, that 
when the lights are low, or turned out, 
at the spiritualist séance, and objects are 
found, when the lights go up, to have been 
brought from all quarters of the room and 
laid in the centre of the table; or when the 
people sitting in the dark round the table 
hear the piano near the door being played, 
the theory was that these marvels are not 
necessarily due to the presence and inter- 
vention of ghosts. I believe that it was 
the case of Eusapia Palladino that was en- — 
gaging Sir Oliver Lodge’s attention just 

then; and he advanced the striking hypo- 
thesis that the piano was played and the 
objects fetched from the sideboard by a 
kind of extension of the medium’s body. 
I forget whether the distinguished Pro- 


154 


Things Near and Far 


fessor used the instance; but I know that 
the impression conveyed to my mind was 
that something happened similar to the 
protrusion and withdrawal of a snail’s 
horns: Eusapia’s arm became twice or 
thrice its usual length, performed the re- 
quired feat whatever it was, and then 
shrank again to its normal size. This hy- 
pothesis was novel in those days; now it is 
widely known and credited amongst spirit- 
ualists. They have found a name for the 
mysterious substance which projects itself 
from the medium’s body: it is called ecto- 
plasm. In all probability the whole theory 
is a pack of nonsense, and the “‘phenom- 
ena” are the tricks of clever cheats: still, 
what do we know? At all events, I 
worked it all into my fairy tale, mixing up 
the old view that the fairy tales, the stories 
of Little People, are in fact traditions of 
the aborigines of these islands, small, dark 
men who took refuge under the hills from 
the invading Celt; with this view of the 
capacities of the human body, and my 
view, still newer, that the fairies may still 
be found under the hills, and that they are 
far from being pleasant little people. 
That was the recipe for the tale, and I 


155 


Things Near and Far 


give it in spite of a friendly rebuke I once 
received from poor H. B. Irving. He 
was talking to me about the Introduction 
I had written to ‘“The Great God Pan.” 

“You shouldn’t have done it,’ he said. 
‘You destroy the illusion. Never take 
people behind the scenes. I never do.” 

But it really doesn’t matter. And, 
further, I have a suspicion that it is often 
much more interesting ‘‘behind” than “in 
front.” I have seen some very fine 
theatrical storms in my time; they did 
these things very well in the days of the 
elder Irving at the Lyceum, but I never 
enjoyed any of those tempests half so 
much as a storm I once watched from the 
wings, while Sir Frank Benson was play- 
ing King Lear. Everything, of course, 
was pitchy dark, save where a farthing 
light was glimmering in some odd corner. 
By this light crouched a squat form, that 
of the assistant stage-manager. In one 
hand he held the Prompt Copy of the 
Play, with all the cues duly indicated in 
it. He held it up as close as he could to 
the miserable glimmer, and had evidently 
as much as he could do to see the script 
with its various interlineations and 


156 


Things Near and Far 


noughts and crosses, and all sorts of queer 
hieroglyphics which mean a great deal to 
a stage-manager’s eye. But in the other 
hand he held a drumstick, and coming 
nearer I saw that the big drum was beside 
him on the boards, and that near at hand 
dim figures stood ready for some mys- 
terious service. A: voice is heard from 
somewhere: 


“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! 
Blow 

You cataracts and hurricanes, spout 

Till you have drench’d your steeples, drown’d 
the cocks, 

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, 

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, 

Singe my white head; and then, all-shaking 
thunder—”’ 


And soon. And all the while the man 
with the big drum was commenting on the 
text. At certain points, bang! would 
come the drumstick on the drum, and that 
gave the cue to the man who stood by the 
thunder-sheet, which he caused to waggle 
violently, and at the same moment 
“Props” released his lightnings. It was 
far better behind than in front, to my 


157 


Things Near and Far 


taste, at all events. And so a man of 
letters of very great distinction once said 
to me: 

‘“T’ve been reading your ‘Great God 
Pan.’ I didn’t make much of it. Con- 
fused, it seemed to me. But when I read 
the Introduction, I said to myself: ‘Good 
heavens! Here’s a man who writes as 
wellias Idol” 

And I may say that the literary gentle- 
man meant this as a very great compli- 
ment; indeed so it was. 

Well, we have been speaking a little of 
the stage. And in the earlier rehearsals 
of a play a good deal is taken for granted, 
or indicated by the gentleman in charge. 
I am speaking of the old days, be it under- 
stood, and of the Shakespearean Touring 
Company in the provinces. ‘The com- 
pany is assembling in the wings in small 
groups, one strolling in after another, 
some of them with the cheerful look of 
those who have partaken of refreshment. 
On the whole the men keep together, and 
the women talk to each other. The cur- 
tain is down, and by it is a deal table and 
a couple of windsor chairs—or it may be 
a couple of golden thrones. At the table 

158 


Things Near and Far 


sit the stage-manager and his assistant, 
occupied with the prompt copies and va- 
rious documents connected with the busi- 
ness of the morning. Above their heads 
burns the T-piece; piping in the shape of 
a capital T, with the top bar pierced and 
flaming with gas-jets. The stage-man- 
ager looks at his watch. “Five past 
eleven! All ready for the Procession! 
March off.” 

The stage-manager has risen from his 
windsor chair—or throne, as the case may 
be—and is looking up stage with his back 
to the curtain. As he says, ‘‘March off,”’ 
he indicates the music that isn’t there: 

‘“‘Too-too, too-too—too-too, tootery- 
too, too-too,” is something like the time 
and tune of the music as it will be “on 
the night’’; stamping with one foot on 
the stage to increase the realism of the 
performance. ‘The old stage direction 
reads something like: ‘‘A sennet within. 
Culverins shot off,” and accordingly the 
stage-manager interrupts his “‘too-tooing”’ 
at intervals: 

‘“Too-too, tootery-too! Bang!” bring- 
ing his practicable foot down on the 
boards with a terrific crash. 


159 


Things Near and Far 


‘““Too-too-too, too-too: Bang!” 

Then: ‘‘March over. ‘Flourish of 
Trumpets. Tara-tara-tara, ta-ta-ta. Cur- 
tain up! Tara-tara, ta-ta-ta-ta-tara. 
Procession on.”’ 

The Procession of Knights and Ladies 
which has been forming the dusty obscur- 
ity of the wings begins to advance and 
cross an imaginary line which marks the 
place where the scenery will be on the 
night. They make more especially for a 
position up stage (L.U.E.) where there 
will be, at the proper time, a Gothic arch- 
way. The “taras” are still going on. 
They are violently interrupted. 

‘“Where’s the Rush-strewer?”’ howls 
the stage-manager. “Mr. Machen! 
(fff) Mr. Machen! Lobbit! (to the 
hovering call-boy) Call Mr. Machen! 
(To the Procession) Go back. I am 
going to have this done properly, if we 
have to stay all day for it.” 

The call-boy rushes violently into the 
darkness. His voice is heard vociferating — 
‘‘Mr. Machen!”’ in passages and on stairs. 
Finally, Mr. Machen appears, looking 
flurried or sulky, as the case may be. 
The stage-manager, who had been dis- 

160 


Things Near and Far 


cussing beer with Mr. Machen a short 
- quarter of an hour before, in a friendly 
and familiar manner, is now, very prop- 


erly, distant and offcial. 
‘Mr. Machen, I wish you would con- 


_trive to be more punctual. Better be an 
hour too soon on the stage than a second 


tolate, )Youcan ty, learn) to acti you 
know, by staying away from rehearsal!’ 

Mr. Machen murmurs something about 
‘ten minutes allowed for variation of 
clocks.” The stage-manager grunts im- 


patiently. Mr. Machen places himself at 


the head of the procession with an 
imaginary bundle of rushes on his left 
arm. The too-tooing, the banging, the 
taraing are done all over again, and 


at last the stage-manager announces: 


‘Flourish over’’—and the play begins. 
In other words, after the little difficult- 


ies and delays that I have indicated, ‘The 


Three Impostors’” was published in the 
Keynote Series at the Bodley Head. It 
didn’t do so well as “The Great God 
Pan.” ‘The title was a bad one. ‘Then, 
as my French colleague, the late P. J. 
Toulet, said to me afterwards: “Ce livre 
est trop fumiste, ou pas assez fumiste’’ ; 


161 


Things Near and Far 


the farce and the tragedy in it were not 
well mixed. And again, there had been 
some ugly scandals in the summer of ’95, 
which had made people impatient with 
reading matter that was not obviously 
and obtrusively “healthy’’; and so, for 
one reason or another, ‘The Three Im- 
postors” failed to set the Fleet Ditch on 
fire. 

Whereupon I began to think about my 
next book. I had done, as I have said, 
with Stevensonianism and White Pow- 
ders; now we were to have something 


entirely new. “Tara, tara, tara!’’—in 
the stage-manager’s manner. ‘This time 
there was to be no doubt of it. ‘“‘Every- 


$9) 


body ready for the Great Romance! 

I started fair. ‘There was to be some- 
thing different from the former books: | 
knew that. But I hadn't the remotest 
notion of what this new book was to be 
about. I used to go out in the morning 
and pace the more deserted Bloomsbury 
squares and wonder very much what it 
would be like. I got the hint I wanted at 
last from a most interesting essay by Mr. 
Charles Whibley, written by way of Intro- 
duction to “Tristram Shandy.” Mr. 

162 


Things Near and Far 


Whibley was discussing the picaresque in 
literature.. He pointed out that while 
“Gil Blas” and its early Spanish originals 
represented the picaresque of the body, 
and *“‘Don Quixote” was picaresque both 
of mind and body, ‘Tristram Shandy” 
was picaresque of the mind alone. ‘The 
wandering in that extraordinary book is, 
in other words, noumenal, not phenom- 
enal. I caught hold of that notion: the 
thought that a literary idea may be pre- 
sented from the mental as well as the 
physical side of things, and said to myself: 
“T will write a ‘Robinson Crusoe’ of the 
mind.’ ‘That was the beginning of ‘The 
Hill of Dreams.’”’ It was to represent 
loneliness not of body on a desert island, 
but loneliness of soul and mind and spirit 
in the midst of myriads and myriads of 
men. I had some practical experience of 
this state to help me; not altogether in 
vain had I been constrained to dwell in 
Clarendon Road and to have my habita- 
tion in the tents of Notting Hill Gate. 
I immediately marked down all these old 
experiences as a valuable asset in the un- 
dertaking of my task: I knew what it 
was to live on a little in a little room, 


163 


Things Near and Far 


what it meant to pass day after day, 
week after week, month after month 
through the inextricabilis error of the 
London streets, to tread a grey labyrinth 
whose paths had no issue, no escape, no 
end. I had known as a mere lad how ter- 
rible it was on a gloomy winter’s evening 
to go out because the little room had 
become intolerable, to go out walking 
through those multitudinous _ streets 
stretching to beyond and beyond, to see 
the light of kindly fires leaping on the 
walls, to see friendly faces welcoming fa- 
ther or husband or brother, to hear laugh- 
ter or a song sounding from within, per- 
haps to catch a half glimpse of the faces 
of the lovers as they looked out, happy, 
into the dark night. All this had been 
my daily practice and use for a long 
while; I was qualified then, in a measure, 
to describe the fate of a Robinson Crusoe 
cast on the desert island of the tremen- 
dous and terrible London. Thus was ac- 
complished what Garrick called, much to 
the Doctor’s amusement, the ‘“‘first con- 
coction’”’ of the book. 

I am sorry that I cannot trace the fur- 

164 


Things Near and Far 


ther steps in its elaboration with a like 
minuteness. All this time I was getting 
my green-mounted review cuttings of 
“The Three Impostors.”” I have kept 
them, I know, for I keep all my reviews, 
but I cannot lay my hands on them. I be- 
lieve, though, that their general import 
was that I was something of a pretentious 
ass and that my horrors were all humbug; 
and for some obscure reason, which I can- 
not undertake to explain, these notices 
cheered me on immensely in my new 
work. | 

‘“T cannot undertake to explain’; that 
is the very truth. Why should a man 
whose only life consists in writing books 
feel highly elated at being told on good 
authority that he is utterly and entirely 
incapable of doing anything of the kind; 
that he is clever, perhaps, in a thin sort of 
way, but that his most prized effects at 
which he has evidently toiled—as the 
reviewer declares—with most laborious 
pains miss fire completely; that his 
endeavours to be this, that and the other 
are really pathetic in their utter failure; 
that his lightnings and thunderings are 

165 


Things Near and Far 


effects of the property man? I do not 
know why this should be so, and perhaps 
if I knew I should not tell; but I think 
I know that there are deep things in 
psychology, in the real psychology, not in 
the muck-heap of the psychoanalytical 
chemists. At all events, I know that 
when I read a review which ended, say, 
with: ‘We can only wish Mr. Machen 
better luck with his next bag of thauma- 
turgic tricks,’ I would be much uplifted, 
and go out and pace Mecklenburgh 
Square and the old graveyard by Heath- 
cote Street in a happy mood of invention, 
feeling that the new book lay all simple 
and plain before me. 

So, thus cheered and highly comforted, 
I went on my daily tours about the 
Bloomsbury squares, about waste places 
abutting on the King’s Cross Road, about 
the wonderland of Barnsbury, taking 
with me the problem of this great book 
that was to be made; this book that was ~ 
to be the better part of me. Why, it was 
only the other day that a friend, who is 
curious like myself, in the remaining oddi- 
ties of London, took me for a short stroll 
near the Gray’s Inn Road. 

166 


Things Near and Far 


“IT think,” said he, ‘that I can show 
you something that you will like.” 

In his voice was the pride of the collec- 
tor, who takes his keys, opens his safe, 
and draws out the rich case, containing 
“Pickwick” in the original numbers, with 
the cancelled plates, unopened leaves, 
all the advertisements, preserved, per- 
fect condition, autograph letter signed 
‘Charles Dickens,” giving the source of 
the character of Sam Weller in separate 
portfolio: all the pride of one who pos- 
sesses such a treasure was in the voice of 
my friend. 

He led me round corner after corner, 
by turns into ways that became more and 
more obscure. ‘Then, elated, he said: 
mbnerc.!) 

In the by-street I saw a queer house, 
standing in a sunken yard away from the 
pavement. It was painted in cream 
colour, and grotesque heads, intended to 
be medieval, were peppered over its 
frontage. I knew it well. 

“T never expected to see that again,” 
I said. “I thought it would have been 
pulled down long ago; like the ‘Rows’ 
that once led from Great Coram Street. 

167 


Things Near and Far 


And, unless I am mistaken, we shall find 
Hebrew letters inscribed on plaster shields 
applied to the house front.”’ 

The Hebrew inscriptions were still 
there; very faint, but still there. I had 
last seen them in ’95—'96 when I was 
entangled in the most intricate problems 
of “The Hill of Dreams.” 

I have told already some of the troubles 
of the book: the battle of the second chap- 
ter, the notion sought in vain for three 
weeks: the affair of the fifth chapter when 
I lost my way completely and wrote many 
thousands of words that had to be 
rejected. Nearly all the journey, from 
the autumn of 1895 to the spring of 1897, 
there were doubts and trials and question- 
ings: after all, was it not hopeless; would 
it not be better to tear it up and start 
afresh on a new book? In the summer 
of 1896, when I was in the thick of these 
perplexities, I spent a month in Provence 
and Languedoc, visiting places the very 
names of which are incantations: Arles, 
Avignon, Nimes, Montpellier, Beaucaire, 
famed Tarascon by Rhone; and I saw 
how the sun can shine on the white cliff 
road by Marsilho—to give the city its 

168 


Things Near and Far 


Provencal name, which you must pro- 
nounce, as near as may be, Mar-see-yo-ho. 
And the changing of the colours of the 
sea there, as the sun sank and brief twi- 
light gathered and the moon rose: here 
were marvels and beauties that sank 
deeply into the heart. 

A wonderful land, indeed. The olive 
garths, of such a silvery, dim green as our 
northern seas sometimes put on near the 
land, the scented rosemary growing as a 
weed by the roadside, the walls of Avignon 
seen by sunset light, the great Roman 
arenas, still in use for bull-fights, a matter 
not remote from their original purpose, 
the Temple of Diana at Nimes, no ruin, 
but a perfect building into which the 
priest of Diana might well enter as you 
viewed the portal from the modern street; 
and above all the splendour of that south- 
ern sun shining on white rocks, on the 
dark cypresses, on the white arch which 
looked as clear and fine as if it had been 
built a year, which was eighteen hundred 
years old or more: all these are Provence; 
not at all forgetting the Bouillabaisse 
which Pascal makes in the Old Port, Pas- 
cal who roasts his incomparable par- 


169 


Things Near and Far 


tridges before a fire of vine boughs. 
More than once I felt that I had made a 
journey rather in time than space, that 
these black cypresses and clear white 
walls and green and silvery olives were 
present not in our day but in the old 
Roman world. 

The last few days of my visit to Pro- 
vence I spent in a little hotel at a place 
called Roucas Blanc, not far from Mar- 
seilles. The hotel, sheltered by the white 
rock and the dark green woods, had been 
built on the very verge of the sea, and in 
the morning I would open the door-win- 
dow of my apartment and stand on a plat- 
form, but a few feet above the water. I 
would lean over the low wall, and wonder 
at the jewelled glory of the Mediterra- 
nean blue beneath the mounting sun— 
and my heart was at home, in Gray’s Inn, 
in my old Japanese bureau, in the litter of 
papers that awaited me there, in the 
wretched book that I was struggling to 
make. Aqui esta encerrado el alma del 
licenciado. What have I said of the 
paradox of life, that its actualities are so 
nauseous that men will do anything to 
escape from them? And here was I, 

170 


Things Near and Far 


free to enjoy the sun on the Provencal 
sea and the wonder of the Roman world, 
hankering after the world of anguish and 
difficulty and disappointment that I had 
made for myself in grim Verulam Build- 
ings, amidst the London fogs. 

And so I got back and found that the 
labour of months had been wasted, and 
set to work to break and remake. ‘The 
book was finished, somehow, in the 
March of 1897, and just then, as if he 
had come upon his cue, a new publisher, 
Mr. Grant Richards, wrote to me asking 
if I had any manuscripts that I should 
like to have published. I saw him and 
left) Phe) Hill of: Dréeams!* with ‘him. 
He did not take long to make up his mind 
about it. He would have none of it, and 
he wrote advising me by no means to pub- 
lish the book; for, he said, it would do 
me no credit. What he meant was that 
it was not in the least like “The Three 
Impostors,” and it took him ten years 
before he saw light on the subject, for it 
was the firm of Grant Richards that pub- 
lished ‘“The Hill of Dreams” in 1907. 

Some amusing reviews appeared. ‘The 
‘Daily Graphic”’ said, very truly, that the 

171 


Things Near and Far 


book was not of much practical interest, 
and the “Outlook” confirmed this dictum 
by stating that there was “‘scarcely a place 
for it in the widest utilitarian view.” 
‘Will readily impress a reader of quiet 
tastes,’ declared the gentler “Scotsman.” 
‘Nothing that more quickly tends to te- 
dium,”’ corrected the ‘‘Manchester Guard- 
ian’’: naturally enough, if the “Atheneum” 
was right in saying that ‘the main matter 
of regret is the utter formlessness and the 
arid inhumanity of his work.” ‘Well 
written, but written not quite well 
enough,” was the fatal sentence of the 
“Chronicle.” And so on, and so on. I 
will not disguise the fact that some of 
the notices were very good indeed; but 
it has always been the other sort of re- 
view that has heartened me, and so forth- 
with I set about writing a book in high 
spirits. This turned out to be ‘The 
Secret Glory,’ which was published in the 
spring of 1922. ‘This book also was on 
the whole very well reviewed, though it 
is as queer as queer can be—I am afraid 
I must say that the bridge is not nearly 
so well kept now as in the brave days of 
old. But one reviewer stood out boldly, 
172 


Things Near and Far 


and him I will quote in full, and so make 
an end of talking about reviews, which 
some authors jeer at, which I treasure 
with reverent care. 


“Even if we wished, we could not 
tell the story of ‘The Secret Glory.’ 
Mr. Machen manages to combine an on- 
slaught on the public-school system with 
some watery Paterian mysticism. Per- 
sonally, we have an equal dislike of 
those who belaud and those who de- 
nigrate the public-school system. Be- 
sides, ‘there ain’t no sich person’; there 
are as many systems as there are public 
schools. But Ambrose Meyrick, if he 
could have been jerked for a moment 
by his creator into a semblance of real 
existence, would justify the worst out- 
rages wrought upon him by his equally 
incredible alma mater. He is a senti- 
mental philanderer with esthetic Ca- 
tholicism, a mystical Celtic dreamer, a 
Soho Bohemian (before Soho was 
ruined, of course) ; but these crimes are 
as nothing compared to his incorrig- 
ible penchant for ‘poetic prose.’ Mr. 
Machen has encouraged him init. He 


173 


Things Near and Far 


will have a great deal more to answer 
for in the day of judgment than the 
schoolmaster who tried to beat him out 
Obit 


There! That notice, which appeared 
in ‘The Nation and the Atheneum,” 
was signed by Mr. J. Middleton Murry, 
generally recognised as being one of the 
most eminent literary critics of the day, 
if he is not rather to be accounted as the 
most eminent literary critic of the day. 
He is also, as a fellow-writer assured me, 
regarded as ‘‘the leader of the younger 
intelligentsia.” Anyhow, I like a man 
who speaks his mind. I try to do so my- 
self, sometimes. 

And “there!”’ again. I think I have 
written enough about the manner in which 
I thought of my books, the manner in 
which I wrote my books, the manner in 
which I broke down more or less lament- 
ably in the beginning, the middle and the 
end of my books, the manner in which 
they were welcomed by eager publishers, 
and the manner in which they finally tot- 
tered into print and were acclaimed by 
the Press. Enough has been said on all 


174 


Things Near and Far 


these topics, and perhaps a good deal 
too much for the patience of a weary 
world. 

Let us now be brief on this matter. 
The year 1898 I spent in the service of 
“Literature,” a weekly journal that had 
just been started by “The Times.” In 
1899 I wrote “Hieroglyphics” and “The 
White People,” and the first chapter of 
pan Pragment, of: Life.” ‘Then a) great 
sorrow which had long been threatened 
fell upon me: I was once more alone. 


175 


Chapter IX 


T was somewhere about the autumn 
| of 1899 that I began to be conscious 
that the world was being presented to 

me atanew angle. I find now an extreme 
difficulty in the choice of words to convey 
my meaning; ‘“‘a new angle” is clumsy 
enough, ‘“‘here in this world he changed 
his life’’ is far too high in its associations; 
but there certainly came to be a strange- 
ness in the proportion of things, both in 
things exterior and interior. And it is 
in these latter that I held and still hold 
that the true wonder, the true mystery, 
the true miracle reside. There is the old 
proverb, of course: ‘Seeing is believing” 
and, for once, the old proverb is widely 
astray. All phenomenal perception is apt 
to be deceitful, and very often is deceitful. 
This is in the nature of things, as Berke- 
ley pointed out a very long time ago. 
That castle tower that looks round in the 
distance is found to be square when you 


176 


Things Near and Far 


get a little nearer to it; the red and golden 
glory and the magic architecture of the 
sunset cloud would change, if you were 
in it, into something like a London fog. 
And if it be objected: ‘‘Yes, exactly; when 
you are far away from an object you see 
it incorrectly, but when you come near it 
you see it correctly’—that is not so. If 
you were near enough to the tower, with 
your nose within six inches of it, you only 
see a certain limited extent of stone sur- 
face; the tower, qua tower, has entirely 
disappeared. But you see the stone sur- 
face accurately? No, you don't. ‘The 
ant crawling up it has a wildly different 
vision and perception of that stone surface 
from your vision and perception; and a 
microscope gives yet another vision, dif- 
ferent from either; and as magnification 
must be infinite in potentiality, though not 
in actu, it is quite clear that no one can 
ever see the truth of any external object 
presented to the eyes: there must always 
be, in theory and perhaps, eventually, in 
fact, another microscope of still higher 
magnifying power, which will entirely 
change the aspect of the thing seen. And 
thus, without tedious specification and ex- 


177 


Things Near and Far 


ample of all the other senses, I mustn't 
even call the poker stiff, lest the man in 
the chair on the other side of the fire take 
it up and tie it into a knot before my eyes, 
proving that I have been talking foolishly. 
And get the rarest Bordeaux that money 
can buy, and offer Bill the navvy a glass; 
and watch his face as he calls for ale to 
wash that muck, that ... something 
muck, out of his mouth. 

All this, of course, is mere philosophic 
A.B.C., and if I thought this book likely 
to penetrate into philosophic circles [I 
should apologise for a clumsy rehash of 
Berkeley’s irresistible conclusions; but I 
do not think that the readers of ‘‘Mind” 
will trouble themselves about me; and I 
am afraid that those of us who have not 
been rectified by the study of philosophy 
are still inclined to think that seeing is 
believing and that some things are hard 
and others soft, and so on. And, no 
doubt, there is a kind of relative and highly 
inferior sort of truth in these proposi- 
tions: don’t knock your head against a 
stone wall, for instance, is a perfectly 
sound bit of practical advice, since, con- 

178 


Things Near and Far 


sidered in relation to your skull, the stone 
wall zs hard and will hurt. And so with 
‘seeing is believing”: in nine hundred and 
ninety-nine cases out of a thousand you 
will be absolutely correct in saying: 
“Hullo! There’s old Secretan walking 
up the garden path.” But there is that 
thousandth—or millionth—case in which 
it turns out that old Secretan was busy in 
Tibet or busy dying at the moment you 
were quite certain that you saw him ap- 
proaching the hall-door of The Cedars: 
and then where is your “‘seeing is believ- 
ing’ maxim? I had a curious instance of 
this in the midst of the famous “Angels of 
Mons” controversy. An officer of very 
high distinction wrote to me from the 
front, and described a most remarkable 
experience which had been vouchsafed to 
him and to others during the retreat of 
August, 1914. The battle of Le Cateau 
was fought on August 26th. My corre- 
spondent’s division, as he writes—his let- 
ter is quoted at length in the Introduction 
to the second edition of ““The Bowmen’’— 
was heavily shelled, ‘had a bad time of 
it,’ but retired in good order. It was on 


179 


Things Near and Far 


the march all the night of the 26th, and 
throughout August 27th, with only about 
two hours’ rest. 

“By the night of the 27th we were all 
absolutely worn out with fatigue—both 
bodily and mental fatigue. No doubt 
we also suffered to a certain extent from 
shock; but the retirement still continued in 
excellent order, and I feel sure that our 
mental faculties were still quite sound and 
in good working condition. On the night 
of the 27th I was riding along in the col- 
umn with two other officers. We had 
been talking and doing our best to keep 
from falling asleep on our horses. As we 
rode along I became conscious of the fact 
that, in the fields on both sides of the 
road along which we were marching, I 
could see a very large body of horsemen. 
These horsemen had the appearance of 
squadrons of cavalry, and they seemed 
to be riding across the fields and going in 
the same direction as we were going, and 
keeping level with us. The night was 
not very dark, and I fancied that I could 
see squadron upon squadron of these caval- 
rymen quite distinctly. I did not say a 
word about it at first, but I watched them 

180 


Things Near and Far 


for about twenty minutes. The other 
two officers had stopped talking. At last 
one of them asked me if I saw anything 
in the fields. I then told him what I had 
seen. The third officer then confessed 
that he too had been watching these horse- 
men for the past twenty minutes. So 
convinced were we that they were really 
cavalry that, at the next halt, one of the 
officers took a party of men out to recon- 
noitre, and found no one there... . 
The same phenomenon was seen by many 
men in our column. . . . I myself am ab- 
solutely convinced that I saw these horse- 
men; and I feel sure that they did not 
exist only in my imagination.” 

Now I have not the faintest notion what 
really happened to the Colonel, to the two 
officers and to many of the men in the 
column. What concerns us for the mo- 
ment is that these people were at first per- 
fectly certain that they saw sensible ob- 
jects, that is, cavalrymen, and then per- 
fectly certain that there were no sensible 
objects to see; and therefore it may be con- 
cluded from this instance and from many 
instances, of like sort, that the senses are 
deceptive; that the world of the senses }s 

181 


Things Near and Far 

very largely a world of illusion and de- 
lusion. ‘To give a sharp example of what 
I mean: I would say that the old story of 
the oak and the dryad is much nearer to 
the real and final truth about the oak 
than the scientific classification and de- 
scription of the tree in a manual of Den- 
drology. Not that I believe that a spirit 
in the shape of a beautiful woman of an- 
other order of being to our own is some- 
how bound up with the life of the oak 
tree; but I do believe that the truth about 
the oak tree—as about all else—is a great 
mystery, which is quite beyond the pur- 
view of all sensible—that is scientific— 
perception and enquiry. 

And so, when I speak of that singular 
rearrangement of the world into which I 
entered in the late summer of 1899, I do 
not desire to lay much stress on the sen- 
sible, or material, phenomena which were 
presented to me. I marvel, but I mar- 
vel with caution, remembering the mani- 
fold deceits of the senses, the phantas- 
magoria or shadow show that they are 
always displaying before us; remember- 
ing also that when the super-normal is 
manifested it is usually, in nine cases out 

182 


Things Near and Far 


of ten, irrelevant and insignificant. For 
example, in the case of old Secretan, seen 
walking up the path to the hall-door of 
The Cedars, but discovered afterwards 
to have an undoubted alibi, either on his 
dying bed or in Tibet. Suppose the lat- 
ter case, suppose that Secretan returns 
and that you collar him and ask him if 
he remembers what he was doing about 
five o'clock of the afternoon of June 28th. 

‘What makes you ask that?” he may 
reply, likely enough. “I thought it rum 
at the time. Here’s the entry in my diary. 
‘June 28th. Had rank goat and tea with 
rancid butter in it in the afternoon. 
Thought of the jolly tea and tennis parties 
at The Cedars and wondered how old 
Jones was getting on in the City.’”’ 

And, it seems shocking, but it is prob- 
ably the truth, that if Secretan had been 
really engaged, not in Tibet but in dying, 
his thought, the strength which projected 
his shadow on that gravel path of The 
Cedars, Thames Ditton, was: ‘Beastly 
taste in my mouth! Wish I could get 
round to old Jones’s and wash it out with 
a glass of his pre-war whiskey. Eh?” 
> « « and the silence: 

183 


Things Near and Far 


And all this, as I say, is irrelevant and 
insignificant; and then again the rats and 
snakes and other objects seen by the de- 
lirium tremens patient; they really don't 
matter—save to the patient aforesaid, 
who, of course, is quite sure that they are 
there. So, again, I distrust the senses, 
and though I wondered and still wonder, 
I make nothing much of the great gusts 
of incense that were blown in those days 
into my nostrils, of the odours of rare 
gums that seemed to fume before invisible 
altars in Holborn, in Claremont Square, 
in grey streets of Clerkenwell, of the sa- 
vours of the sanctuary that were perceived 
by me in all manner of grim London 
wastes and wanderings. One would like 
to think of the Knights of the Grail who 
were ware of the “odour of all the rarest 
spiceries in the world” before the Vision 
was given to them: but . . . if one is not 
a Knight of the Grail, but far otherwise? 

Then, again, there was that morning, a 
bright, keen morning of November it 
seems in my recollection, when I was walk- 
ing up Rosebery Avenue with a friend, and 
suddenly became aware of a strange sen- 
sation, and as suddenly recollected the old 

184 


Things Near and Far 


proverb: “walking on air.” I remember 
thinking at the time: “‘this is incredible” ; 


and yet it was a fact. The pavement of 


that horrible street had suddenly become, 
not air, certainly, but resilient; the impact 


of my feet upon it was buoyant; the sensa- 
tion was delicious. I may mention that 
that very morning I had made a certain 


interior resolution; but I do not venture 
- for one moment to connect this with that; 
I only tell what happened to me. I make 
no deductions, nor do [ venture to con- 
clude anything: remembering always that 
neither seeing nor smelling nor feeling is 


necessarily believing. But so it was, ex- 
actly as I have told it. 

And then there was one afternoon in 
my sitting-room at 4 Verulam Buildings, 
Gray’s Inn. I was sitting in my chair, 
and the wall trembled and the pictures on 
the wall shook and shivered before my 
eyes, as if a sudden wind had blown into 
the room. Let me hasten to say that 
there was no wind, no actual wind, that 
is; and that I knew at the time that there 
was no wind, and was, in consequence, 
not a little alarmed, not knowing what 


_would happen next. And I must already 


185 


Things Near and Far 


correct my phrase: I have said that the 
pictures on the wall opposite to the win- 
dow that looked on the garden of the Inn 
‘shook and shivered.” It is not quite 
just: trembled, dilated, became misty in 
their outlines; seemed on the point of dis- 
appearing altogether, and then shuddered 
and contracted back again into their 
proper form and solidity: that is the 
closest description of what I witnessed: 
with a shaking heart, and with a sense 
that something, I knew not what, was also 
being shaken to its foundations. This is 
all wonderful? I suppose that it is; but 
let me here say firmly that I consider an 
act of kindness to a wretched mangy kit- 
ten to be much more important. 

But now comes a puzzle. We are 
highly composite beings. We all know 
that a stomach-ache may make a man very 
miserable, and I believe that science is 
beginning to admit that misery may give 
a man a very bad stomach-ache. ‘There 
are old phrases about a “‘sinking heart,” 
and a man’s heart being “‘in his boots.” 
Well, it seems that the heart does not 
sink, but that the stomach does, when sub- 
jected to certain emotional perturbations. 


186 


Things Near and Far 

Only this morning I was reading in the 
paper of new radiographic experiments 
which shewed that under certain stimula- 
tions of horror or fear or grief the stom- 
ach sometimes falls from one to three 
inches, and the doctor who was conduct- 
ing the experiments declared that there 
was the brighter side; that he had men- 
tioned possible “‘pints of bitter’? to some 
of his subjects, with the result that there 
was a perceptible and upward movement 
of the organ in question. And so the 
play goes round in a ring, with a constant 
action and reaction of the physical and 
mental—or psychical, or spiritual—and 
it will often be difficult to say where the 
prime cause resides: in the stomach, in 
the brain, or in the immortal spirit. I 
have already professed my belief that the 
true wonders, the true miracles are of the 
spirit, not of the body; I here confess that 
in certain cases I find it difficult to dis- 
entangle the two worlds of our apprehen- 
sion, that is to say definitely that the sen- 
sible thing, the phenomenal thing, is 
always and invariably without any true 
significance. 

And so with that afternoon’s work in 

187 


Things Near and Far 


Gray’s Inn. The shivering pictures that 
seemed on the point to dissolve and return 
into chaos, the sensible thrill of delight 
that accompanied this strange manifesta- 
tion—I had forgotten that part of the 
experience—such phenomena as these may 
be producible, for all I know, by drugs. 
You can, at all events, see far more won- 
_derful things than anything that I saw by 
taking a sufficient dose of Anhelonium 
Lewinii and then shutting your eyes. 
Butane 

I had better begin at the beginning. 
That afternoon I was in a state of very 
dreadful misery and desolation and dere- 
liction of soul. It is strange, but the 
most dreadful pangs of grief are gener- 
ally, I think, bearable in the moment of 
their impact. With the wounds of the 
spirit, it is as with the wounds of the 
body; a certain anesthesia accompanies 
the actual fall of the blow. I once fell 
backwards from some little height, and 
my skull lighting on the edge of a brick, 
I remained unconscious for more than half 
an hour. And I remember distinctly that 
the sensation at the very moment of the 
crash was that of being lifted and gently 

188 


Things Near and Far 


laid on the softest of all downy pillows; 
‘it was only when I raised myself slowly, 
‘not in the least aware that I had been un- 
conscious, that I felt the pain of the great 
bleeding wound at the back of my head, 
and a dismal, heavy throbbing of the 
brow. So with the wounds of hhe soul; 
I had borne what had to be borne with 
some measure of solidity and stolidity; 
the torture of six years of lamentable 
expectation had, as I supposed, seared 
and burned my spirit into dull, insensi- 
tive acquiescence: but I was mistaken. A 
horror of soul that cannot be uttered de- 
scended upon me, on that dim, far-off 
afternoon in Gray’s Inn; I was beside my- 
self with dismay and torment; I could not 
endure my own being. And then a pro- 
cess suggested itself to me, as having the 
possibility of relief, and Rn crediting 
what I had heard of this process or indeed 
having any precise knowledge of it or of 
its results, I did what had to be done—l 
hasten to add without any more exalted 
motives than those which urge a man with 
a raging toothache to get laudanum and 
take it with all convenient speed. I suf- 
fered from a more raging pain than that 
189 


Things Near and Far 


of any toothache, and I wanted that pain 
to be dulled; that was all. 

Well, I made my experiment, expect- 
ing, very doubtfully, almost incredulously, 
certain results. The results that I ob- 
tained were totally different from my ex- 
pectations. I couldn’t have hypnotised, 
cr ‘““magnetised,” or mesmerised, or sug- 
gested, or Couéd, or in any way bedevilled 
myself into the obtained condition for the 
good reason that I had never heard of 
it, had no faintest notion of it, and was, 
in fact, as I have stated, not a’ litela 
alarmed by it, half-thinking, if the truth 
be told, that I was very near to death. 
I may state, by the way, that in the course 
of a pretty extensive acquaintance with 
“occult”? company, I only once heard of 
anything at all comparable with this 
strange adventure of mine. A man was 
running on, foolishly and_ uncritically 
enough, about his various occult expert- 
ences—they were of little interest as a 
whole—and talked at last of some so- 
journ that he had made amongst the 
Moors of Northern Africa. Here, he 
said, he had met a man who had known 
wonders, and he proceeded to tell them. 

190 


jit Near and Far 


There was nothing very wonderful, so far 
as I can remember; but the Moor or 
Arab of the story had an experience like 
enough to mine—I need not say that I 
had not mentioned it nor so much as 
hinted it to my occult acquaintance. The 
African also had seen the walls shiver and 
prepare for dissolution, had felt that the 
world was shaken, and that his heart was 
shaken within him. Mr. Jones-Robinson 
told the tale without any sense, appar- 
ently, that it had any special significance ; 
it was part of his occult pack, that was 
all: and he went on to some sick rubbish 
about the “‘correspondence”’ of the Tarot 
Trumps with the letters of the Hebrew 
Alphabet; and this nonsense he discussed 
with real relish and a high sense of its 
‘infinite importance. I think that he alone 
knew the real ‘‘attribution” of the afore- 
‘said Tarot Trumps, but he ‘‘had received 
‘it under pledge and was not at liberty to 
_speak’’—for which inhibition I was deeply 
‘thankful, having little patience for sol- 
-emn hanky-panky or Abracadabras of any 
sort. But in ending his story of the En- 
‘chanted Moor, he said that this man, 
who had seen the material world quiver- 
IQI 


Things Near and Far 


ing and fading before his eyes, had re- 
ceived, in some manner not indicated, a 
command or an intimation that he must 
‘‘leave everything”; and this he could not 
do, having a wife and children. And I 
must say at once that being pretty well 
acquainted with Jones-Robinson. and all 
his type, I should have paid no more 
attention to his story of the Moor than 
I paid to his story of the Tarot Trumps 
—if it had not been for something which 
I knew and kept to myself, As it was, 
I heard the tale and the injunction, and 
wondered deeply, and still wonder. 

But now to our point: the connection 
between material or sensible things and 
spiritual things, the question whether the 
former are ever of any real consequence 
or significance. As I have said before, 
the evidence that Home the medium rose 


‘““miraculously’’—to adopt a convenient’ 
shorthand—into the air seems to me 
good; but is such a phenomenon of any | 
more true consequence than the phenom- | 


enon of hydrogen gas rising into the air 


from the admixture of water, zinc and | 
sulphuric acid? And so were the incense 


clouds that came to my nostrils in places 
192 | 


Wangs Near and Far 


where, assuredly, no material incense 
smoked, of consequence? Was the bil- 
lowy and resilient pavement of detest- 
able Rosebery Avenue of consequence? 
Were the pictures that shivered and wa- 
vered on the unstable wall of consequence? 
I do not know; but I am sure that the 
state which followed this last experience 
was of high consequence. For when I 
rose, afraid, and broke off the process in 
which I had been engaged, I found to my 
‘utter amazement that everything within 
had been changed. Amazement; for the 
utmost that I had hoped from my experi- 
‘ment was a temporary dulling of the con- 
‘sciousness, a brief opium oblivion of my 
troubles. And what I received was not 
mere dull lack of painful sensation, but 
a peace of the spirit that was quite inef- 
fable, a knowledge that all hurts and doles 
and wounds were healed, that that which 
was broken was reunited. Everything, of 
body and of mind, was resolved into an 
infinite and an exquisite delight; into a 
joy so great that—let this be duly noted 
—it became almost intolerable in its ec- 
stasy. I remember thinking at the time: 
“There is wine so strong that no earthly 


193 


Things Near and Far 


vessels can hold it’: joy threatened to 
become an agony, that must shatter all. 
Emily Bronté, describing the state of 
Heathcliff soon before his death, has de- 
scribed just such a condition; I have often 
wondered how she knew of it. 

But this was later. For that day and 
for many days afterwards I was dissolved 
in bliss into a sort of rapture of life which 
has no parallel that I can think of, which 
has, therefore, no analogies by which it 
may be made more plain. The vine and 
the exultation of the vine are solemn and 
ancient and approved figures of the joys 
of the interior life, but these are not quite 
to my purpose. I can only fall back on 
little things, and quite material things. 
My chambers in Verulam Buildings were 
towards the northern portion of the Inn, 
and the trafic of Theobald’s Road was 
distinct enough, distinct enough, often, to 
be an annoyance. But this night, the 
‘ping, ping!’’ of the omnibus bell, the 
grind of the many wheels upon the cobble- 
stones sounded to me as marvellous and 
tremendous chords reverberating from 
some mighty organ; filling the air, filling 
the soul and the whole being with rapture 

194 | 


Things Near and Far 


immeasurable. And another trifle, as in- 
significant, even more insignificant, per- 
haps. In the ordinary state of existence 
the sense of touch is exercised constantly, 
but almost unconsciously. Now and 
again it is used with intent; the buyer of 
old furniture acquires a sort of thumb- 
and-finger craft; he passes the tips of his 
fingers over the edges of the bureau or 
cabinet, and they help him to decide 
whether the object is an antique or a 
novelty. And so, I suppose, a woman 
choosing stuffs uses her fingers in much 
the same manner, learning something 
about the silk or velvet by the process. 
But in general, and very conveniently, you 
take up pen or pencil, or place your hand 
-on the back of the chair without any dis- 
‘tinct consciousness of the impact of your 
flesh on these exterior objects: unless, 
that is, your hand encounter some unex- 
pected object which insists on notice, such 
as a pin point or a rusty nail. But in 
these strange days of which I am speaking 
touch became an exquisite and conscious 
pleasure; I could not so much as place my 
hand on the table before me without ex- 
periencing a thrill of delight which was 


195 


| 
| 
: 


Things Near and Far 


not merely sensuous, but carried with it, 
mysteriously and wonderfully, the mes- 
sage of a secret and interior joy. 

And one more instance. I had always 
been subject to headaches which visited 
me at intervals of five, six or seven 
weeks, and invariably lasted for twenty- 
four hours. The pain was distressing, 
and any movement of the head raised it 
into a racking, throbbing agony; I should 
imagine that I suffered from a kind of 
migraine or megrims. Late one night 
during the time of which I am speaking 
I felt the first approaches of one of these 
tiresome attacks. I said to myself: “T 
wonder whether I can stop it,” and I 
placed the tip of the forefinger of the 
left hand upon my forehead. I felt the 
sense as of a dull shock: and the pain was 
gone. And though I have had my share 
of pains and aches since then, I have 
never been revisited by that particular 
kind of headache from that day to this. 

And there was yet another matter. In 
a little book of mine called “The Great 
Return,” which nobody has heard of, I 
have told how the Holy Grail came back 
for a brief while to Britain after long 


196 


Things Near and Far 


years. And describing some of the things 
that were seen and known during that 
happy visitation, I have written: 

‘The ‘glow’ as they call it seems more 
dificult to explain (than certain other 
matters duly related). For they say that 
all through the nine days, and indeed after 
the time had ended, there never was a 
man weary or sick at heart in Llantrisant, 
or in the country round it. For if a man 
felt that his work of the body or the mind 

was going to be too much for his strength, 
then there would come to him of a sudden 
a warm glow and a thrilling all over him 
and he felt as strong as a giant, and hap- 
pier than he had ever been in his life be- 
fore, so that lawyer and hedger each re- 
Joiced in the task that was before him, 
as if it were sport and play.” 

_ Thus in the story, and thus it was with 
‘me in fact, in that autumn and winter of 
‘1899-1900. It was with a singular sur- 
prise that I read, in St. Adamnan, many 
years afterwards, how St. Columba’s 
monks, toiling in the fields, experienced 
now and again the very sensation—if it 
be just to speak of it as a sensation—that 
I have described. They, too, weary with 


197 


i 


Things Near and Far 


their work of reclaiming the barren land 
of their isle, would know that sudden 
glow of joy and strength and courage; 
and they believed that it was the prayer 
of their Father in God, Columba, 
strengthening them and inspiring them, as 
he knelt before the altar of the Perpetual 
Choir. And lest it be said that I had 
read Adamnan when I was a boy and had 
forgotten all about it consciously though 
I had retained it subconsciously, I must 
solemnly declare that this was not the 
case; and that when this strange expe- 
rience first befell me, I was overwhelmed 
with astonishment, and could scarcely 
credit that which was actually happening. 
I have hesitated as to whether it should 
be, in strictness, called a sensation, and I 
still hesitate. It seems to me, and I think 
that I can trust my recollection, that the 
two worlds of sense and spirit were ad- 
mirably and wonderfully mingled, so that 
it was difficult, or rather impossible, to 
distinguish the outward and sensible glow 
from the inward and spiritual grace. 
Magnum vere sacramentum. And _ all 
this, be it remembered, would fall out in 
dim Bloomsbury squares, in noisy, clatter- 
198 


Things Near and Far 


ing Gray’s Inn Road, in a train on the 
Underground, amongst hustling crowds 
in common streets. I mention this, not 
forgetful of a pretty severe rebuke which 
I received from a very high literary 
quarter on account of that little book, 
“The Great Return,” which I have just 
cited. The critic noted the fact that in 
my book the Holy Grail was manifested 
to the common people, to common mod- 
ern people, to Welsh tradesmen and 
farmers. He seemed to think this very 
low. It may be low, but perhaps things 
happen in this way sometimes; and so 
with me: I, by no manner of means a 
knight, received joys and knew wonders 
while the trams clanged along the Clerk- 
enwell Road in the grey winter afternoon. 
So it was, and it appears to me necessary 
to tell the truth. As Coventry Patmore 
says, quoting from an earlier writer: 
“Let us not deny in the darkness that 
which we have known in the light.” 
| And beyond all this, beyond these ex- 
periences in which things of the body and 
things of the spirit were mingled, there 
was a better world of which I saw the 
verges. There was no more grief; there 


199 


Things Near and Far 


was no more resentment, there was no 
more anger. The griefs that flood the 
heart with agony, the great sorrows of 
life, these were seen to be but passing 
ries of no moment, like the sorrow of | 
a little child which is past and forgotten 
before its tears are dry. I remember 
tearing up an old diary which I had kept 
in the bitter days of Clarendon Road, 
a record of struggles and starvings and 
desolations; I tore it up because it no 
longer signified anything to me. ‘The 
words, I daresay, were strong enough, 
but the tale had become of no meaning 
at all. I glanced at one page and an- 
other of the tattered old notebook before 
I rent it, with a kind of mild curiosity as 
to the state of mind of the silly stranger 
who had written all this, and had whined 
so dismally. At all events, it had noth- 
ing to do with me, and so it went into 
fragments and into the fire. If it could be 
restored to me now, I should read it all. 
with interest and Bee again and foam 
again seva indignatione; but then I have | 
long returned into that darkness in which, 
I suppose, most of our lives are spent. 
200 


Things Near and Far 


There is one thing that I hope I may 
be spared, that is the comment of the 
Oriental Occult Ass. I confess that I 
have written all this with difficulty, and 
with doubt as to the decency of writing 
it at all, especially when the tale, if it is 
to be a true tale, makes it necessary for 
me to seem to compare, for one little mo- 
ment, the saints of the company and fol- 
lowing of St. Columba with myself. But 
I do hope that nobody will say: “Why, 
this is only Ruja-Puja! You get it all in 
the first chapter of the Anangasataga 
Raja! It’s all perfectly elementary. 
Little Hindu children learn their A.B.C. 
out of it in the Svanka Visatvara. Why, 
when the Swami Vishnakanandaram Jam 
Ghosh was over here last summer he men- 
tioned all these phenomena as things you 
have to forget before you set out on the 
Way. As he put it so beautifully: “The 
sun arises. It gleams onthe Lotus. The 
stars are no longer seen.’ Yes, isn’t he 
wonderful? Fancy anybody still bother- 
ing about Keats and those silly people!” 

I hope, I say, that I shall be spared 
that. I can bear better I think the (more 

201 


Things Near and Far 


or less) Occidental Idiot, who will speak 
of Shin—the letter of the Hebrew Alpha- 
bet, not the delicate portion of our anat- 
omy—attribute it to the Tarot Trump 
called the Fool, and just throw in a ref- 
erence to Salt, Sulphur and Mercury. 

As for me, I make no deductions, I 
infer nothing, I refrain from saying 
“therefore.” Like’ Sancho, )Panzazay@ 
come from my own vineyard; I know 
nothing.”’ Perhaps I may venture to say 
that I have seen a lousy, lazy tramp drink- 
ing from a roadside stream that drips 
cold and pure from the rock in burning 
weather. ‘hen the wastrel passes on his 
ill way, refreshed indeed, but as lousy and 
lazy as ever. 

De torrente in via bibet: propterea 
exaltabit caput. 


202 


Chapter X 


Mr. CHaArLes O'MALLEY, 
Castle O’Malley, Co. Galway. 


HAT was the inscription of a 

card which had just been placed 

in my hand, at which I found 

myself stupidly gazing as I walked along 

Southampton Row—the real old South- 

ampton Row, not the staring, blatant 

street that bears the name now—one fine 
day in the summer of 1900. 

Ten minutes or so before I had been 
taking my morning stroll in the company 
of my bulldog; Juggernaut. I was ac- 
costed very politely by a stoutish, young- 
ish, clean-shaven gentleman, well dressed, 
with the mere suspicion of an Irish accent. 

He had said without preface of any 
kind: 

‘A fine dog you've got, sir. I should 
be very glad if you’d come up with me 
and show it to a lady I know who lives 
in the flats opposite.” 

203 


Things Near and Far 


I assented at once, feeling thoroughly 
in the scene, as they say on the stage. I 
followed him and we displayed the dog 
Juggernaut, certainly a noble specimen 
of his noble race, to the lady who, I may 
say at once, was a lady, and appeared to 
be on terms of polite acquaintance with 
the gentleman. Jug was admired, and the 
gentleman and I went down into the street 
again. The lady had not evinced the 
faintest astonishment at the introduction 
of a total stranger with a bulldog into her 
flat. When we were both down on the 
pavement of Southampton Row, the ama- 
teur of bulldogs gave me his card, and 
told me that I should be welcome and 
more than welcome if ever I found my- 
self near Castle O’Malley, in County 
Galway. And so he vanished—if he ever 
were there, as to which I held and still 
hold, in a fantastic sort of way, vague 
doubts. 

No, the flat was a perfectly quiet and 
unostentatious one. Nothing to drink 
was produced; there were no K.O. drops. 
The lady did not ask me to look in 
again some evening for a quiet game of 
cards with a few congenial friends. Mr. 

204 


Things Near and Far 


‘O’Malley did not say that he had sal- 
vaged a Spanish galleon wrecked beneath 
the rocks on which Castle O’Malley was 
built, and that in consequence he had more 
money than he knew what to do with. 
And I missed nothing from my pocket. 
That is one of the reasons why I hate 
rationalism, since, when it is called in, in 
a little difficulty or perplexity, its advices 
and explanations are always so stupid, 
so wide of the mark, so absolutely futile. 
Finally, from that day to this, I have 
never seen Mr. Charles O’Malley, of 
Castle O’Malley, Co. Galway, nor have 
I heard of him. I have forgotten to say 
that he did not so much as ask me my 
name. 

I only wish that I had kept some kind 
of note of the very strange period which 
I had entered. It came about gradually, 
the merging of Syon into Bagdad; and I 
have a much dimmer recollection of the 
latter city. For its essence, as will be 
seen in the anecdote of the O’ Malley, was 
lack of purpose, a certain fantastic con- 
fusion, a sense that something without 
any ratio might happen at any moment. 
Nothing began, nothing ended: strange 

205 


Things Near and Far 


people were apt to separate themselves 
from the crowd, to engage in queer dis- 
course without intelligible motive or mean- 
ing, and then to sink back again, leaving 
no trace behind. And when events lack 
logical sequence or connection, it is diffi- 
cult to retain them in the memory. But 
I believe that I do remember that on this 
very day of the O’ Malley I noted that ten 
total strangers addressed me, without 
any very manifest reason and to no dis- 
cernible end. We encountered in all 
sorts of places, in the street, in the res- 
taurant, in the vanished Café de l’Europe 
in Leicester Square; the strangers uttered 
their mysterious messages, which to me 
were as incomprehensible as if they had 
been in cipher, and so vanished away. 
Indeed, looking back, I begin to wonder 
whether I were constantly being mistaken 
for someone else, who must have been 
exactly like me; this Someone Else being 
evidently a prominent member of a secret 
society, who would be aware of the signs 
and passwords of the order. For all I 
know, when Mr. O’Malley praised poor 
old Jug—he has long years ago gone to 
be a gargoyle on the parapet of some 
206 


Things Near and Far 


great Gothic church of the skies—I 
should have answered: ‘‘Yes, he is a fine 
dog, but green bulldogs with blue spots 
are finer.” Then, it may be, the inter- 
view would have become coherent, and 
tending to some end, and the lady in the 
flat would have pressed the secret panel 
and have disclosed ...I really don’t 
know what. 

That very day, I mean the day of the 
incident of the Bulldog, Mr. O’Malley 
and the Lady in the Flat, I was sitting in 
the Café de l’Europe with a friend, dis- 
cussing various matters, when, as we rose 
to go a young man of a somewhat colour- 
less and unpretending appearance, who 
had been sitting at the other side of the 
table, suddenly observed: 

‘IT have been very much interested, sir, 
in your conversation, and I should very 
much like to hear more of it.” 

Again, I was in the scene. I gave him 
my address in Gray’s Inn, and he called 
to see me several times, always coming 
at night and staying pretty late, asking me 
many questions about interior things. I 
think it was only on his last visit that I 
found out his odd manner of leaving the 

207 


Things Near and Far 


Inn, when he went away at one or half- 
past one in the morning. He was igno- 
rant of the fact that the Raymond Build- 
ings Gate and the Holborn Gate have 
watchers by them who will open the por- 
tals all the long night; and so when he left 
me he would climb the spiked wall which 
separates Verulam Buildings from Gray’s 
Inn Road and make off into the gaslight. 
He, too, vanished, and I saw him no more. 

It was some time earlier in this year 
that I became conscious of a very odd 
circumstance. It will perhaps have been 
noticed that I have become insensibly 
Stevensonian in my diction, as I have © 
spoken of the Incident of the Bulldog, or 
of this or of that. ‘That is so because 
the atmosphere in which I lived was be- 
coming remarkably like the atmosphere 
of ‘‘The Three Impostors,’”’ which, as I 
have remarked, is derived from the “New 
Arabian” manner of R. L. Stevenson. 
Not only did strange and unknown and un- 
explained people start up from every 
corner, from every café table, and engage 
me in obscure mazes of talk, quite in the 
Arabian manner, but I presently became 
aware that something very odd indeed 

208 


Things Near and Far 


was happening: certain characters in ‘“The 
Three Impostors” showed signs of com- 
ing to life, a feat which, perhaps, they 
had failed to perform before. I was 
once talking to a dark young man, of 
quiet and retiring aspect, who wore glasses 
—he and I had met at a place where 
we had to be blindfolded before we could 
see the light—and he told me a queer tale 
of the manner in which his life was in daily 
jeopardy. He described the doings of 
a fiend in human form, a man who was 
well known to be an expert in Black 
Magic, a man who hung up naked women 
in cupboards by hooks which pierced the 
flesh of their arms. This monster—l 
may say that there is such a person, 
though I can by no means go bail for the 
actuality of any of the misdeeds charged 
against him—had, for some reason which 
I do not recollect, taken a dislike to my 
dark young friend. In consequence, so I 
was assured, he hired a gang in Lambeth, 
who were grievously to maim or prefer- 
ably to slaughter the dark young man; 
each member of the gang receiving a re- 
taining fee of eight shillings and sixpence 
a day—a sum, by the way, that sounds as 
209 


Things Near and Far 


if it were the face value of some mediz- 
val coin long obsolete. I listened in won- 
der, for there are some absurdities so 
enormous that they seem to have a stun- 
ning effect on the common sense, paralys- 
ing it for the moment and inhibiting its 
action. It was only when I got home that 
it dawned upon me that I had been listen- 
ing to the Young Man in Spectacles, 
and that he came out of ‘“The Three Im- 
postors.”’ And soon Miss Lally, another 
character from the book, appeared, and 
like her prototype discoursed most amaz- 
ing tales, was the heroine of incredible ad-— 
ventures, would appear and disappear in a 
quite inexplicable manner, relating always 
histories before unheard of, a personage 
wholly diverting, enigmatic and enchan- 
ting. 

And the odd thing is that it was as if 
these two had parts to play for a season, 
and played them—till the prompter’s 
bell sounded, and the curtain fell and the 
lights went out. Both Miss -Lally and 
the Young Man in Spectacles still live; 
but they have become useful members of 
society and eminently successful, as I be- 
lieve, in their several employments. Thus 

210 


| Things Near and Far 


do the King and Queen in the play go 
home to their flats or their lodgings after 
the show and enjoy cold beef, pickles 
and a comfortable bottle of beer. 

And now I am going at last to say a 
good word for literature. I have said, 
again and again, even to tedium that the 
only good that I can see in it is that it is 
one of the many ways of escaping from 
life, to be classified with Alpine Climbing, 
Chess, Methylated Spirit and Prussic 
Acid. ‘The way I have always seen it is 
like this: I go out on a Sunday afternoon 
in March with the black north-easter blow- 
ing to take a walk up Gower Street. I 
say to myself: “O come! I can’t stand 
this,’ and go home and write—or try 
to write—a chapter in “The Hill of 
Dreams.”’ Many people will say that the 
chapter is much worse than the street, and 
I daresay that they are right; but, anyhow, 
it was different: it was, for me, the near- 
est way out of Gower Street and the black 
north-easter. But I believe that there 
may be a little more in literature than 
this. It is certainly the escape from life; 
but perhaps it is also the only means of 
realising and shewing life, or, at least, 

211 


Things Near and Far 


certain aspects of life. Here is an ex- 
ample to my hand. Here am I, not try- 
ing to write literature, but doing my best 
to tell a true tale, and I find that I can 
make nothing of it. I can set down the 
facts, or rather such of them as I remem- 
ber, but I am quite conscious that I am 
not, in 'the real sense of the word, telling 
the truth; that is, I am not giving any 
sense of the very extraordinary atmos- 
phere in which I lived in the year 1900, 
of the curious and indescribable impres- 
sion which the events of those days made 
upon me; the sense that everything had 
altered, that everything was very strange, 
that I lived in daily intercourse with peo- 
ple who would have been impossible, un- 
imaginable, a year before; that the figure 
of the world was changed utterly for me 
—of all this I can give no true picture, 
dealing as I am with what are called facts. 
I maintained long ago in ‘“‘Hieroglyphics” 
that facts as facts do not signify anything 
or communicate anything; and I am sure 
that I was right, when I confess that, as 
a purveyor of exact information, I can 
make nothing of the year rtgoo. But, 
avoiding the facts, | have got a good deal 
212 


| Things Near and Far 


nearer to the truth in the last chapter of 
“The Secret Glory,” which describes the 
doings and feelings of two young people 
who are paying their first visit to London. 
I never bolted up to town with the house- 
master’s red-haired parlour-maid; but 
truth must be told in figures. 

There is one episode of this period of 
which I may say a little more, that is the 
affair of the Secret Society. Putting two 
and two together, a good many years 
after the event, I am inclined to think 
that it was a mere item in the programme 
of strange and Arabian entertainment 
that was being produced for my benefit: 
the Secret Society was of the same order 
as the Incident of Mr. O’Malley and the 
Adventure of the Young Man who always 
left by the Spiked Wall, only of a more 
gorgeous and elaborate kind. And I 
must confess that it did me a great deal 
of good—for the time. ‘To stand wait- 
ing at a closed door in a breathless ex- 
pectation, to see it open suddenly and dis- 
close two figures clothed in a habit that I 
never thought to see worn by the living, 
to catch for a moment the vision of a 
cloud of incense smoke and certain dim 

Zi 


Things Near and Far 


lights glimmering in it before the bandage 
was put over the eyes and the arm felt 
a firm grasp upon it that led the hesitating 
footsteps into the unknown darkness: all 
this was strange and admirable indeed; 
and strange it was to think that within 
a foot or two of those closely curtained 
windows the common life of London 
moved on the common pavement, as 
supremely unaware of what was being 
done within an arm’s length as if our 
works had been the works of the other 
side of the moon. All this was very fine; 
an addition and a valuable one, as I say, 
to the phantasmagoria that was being 
presented to me. But as for anything 
vital in the secret order, for anything 
that mattered two straws to any reason- 
able being, there was nothing of it, and 
less than nothing. Among the members 
there were, indeed, persons of very high 
attainments, who, in my opinion, ought 
to have known better after a year’s mem- 
bership or less; but the society as a society 
was pure foolishness concerned with im- 
potent and imbecile Abracadabras. It 
knew nothing whatever about anything 
and concealed the fact under an impres- 


214 


Things Near and Far 


sive ritual and a sonorous phraseology. 
It had no wisdom, even of the inferior or 
lower kind, in its leadership; it exercised 
no real scrutiny into the characters of 
those whom it admitted, and so it is not 
surprising that some of its phrases and 
passwords were to be read one fine morn- 
ing in the papers, their setting being one 
of the most loathsome criminal cases of 
the twentieth century. 

And yet it had and has an interest of 
a kind. It claimed, I may say, to be of 
very considerable antiquity, and to have 
been introduced into England from abroad 
in a singular manner. I am not quite 
certain as to the details, but the mythos 
imparted to members was something after 
this fashion. A gentleman interested in 
occult studies was looking round the 
shelves of a second-hand bookshop, where 
the works which attracted him were some- 
times to be found. He was examining a 
particular volume—I forget whether its 
title was given—when he found between 
the leaves a few pages of dim manuscript, 
written in a character which was strange 
to him. The gentleman bought the book, 
and when he got home eagerly examined 

215 


Things Near and Far 


the manuscript. It was in cipher; he could 
make nothing of it. But on the manu- 
script—or, perhaps, on a separate slip laid 
next to it—was the address of a person 
in Germany. The curious investigator 
of secret things and hidden counsels wrote 
to this address, obtained full particulars, 
the true manner of reading the cipher and, 
as I conjecture, a sort of commission and 
jurisdiction from the Unknown Heads in 
Germany to administer the mysteries in 
England. And hence arose, or re-arose, 
in this isle the Order of the Twilight Star. 
Its original foundation was assigned to 
the fifteenth century. | 
I like the story; but there was not one 
atom of truth in it. The Twilight Star 
was a stumer—or stumed—to use a very 
old English word. Its true date of origin 
was 1880-1885 at earliest. The “Cipher 
Manuscript”’ was written on paper that 
bore the watermark of 1809 in ink that 
had a faded appearance. But it contained 
information that could not possibly have 
been known to any living being in the year 
1809, that was not known to any living 
being till twenty years later. It was, no 
doubt, a forgery of the early ’eighties. 
216 


Things Near and Far 


Its originators must have had some 
knowledge of Freemasonry; but, so ingen- 
iously was this occult fraud “put upon 
the market” that, to the best of my be- 
lief, the flotation remains a mystery to this 
day. But what an entertaining mystery; 
and, after all, it did nobody any harm. 

It must be said that the evidence of 
the fraudulent character of the Twilight 
Star does not rest merely upon the fact 
that the Cipher Manuscript contained a 
certain piece of knowledge that was not 
in existence in the year 1809. Anny crit- 
ical mind, with a tinge of occult reading, 
should easily have concluded that here was 
no ancient order from the whole nature 
and substance of its ritual and doctrine. 
For ancient rituals, whether orthodox 
or heterodox, are founded on one mythos 
and on one mythos only. They are 
grouped about some fact, actual or sym- 
bolic, as the ritual of Freemasonry is said 
to have as its centre certain events con- 
nected with the building of King Solo- 
mon’s Temple, and they keep within their 
limits. But the Twilight Star embraced 
all mythologies and all mysteries of all 
races and all ages, and: “referred” or 

219 


Things Near and Far 


“attributed” them to each other and 
proved that they came to much the same 
thing; and that was enough! That was 
not the ancient frame of mind; it was not 
even the 1809 frame of mind. But it was 
very much the eighteen-eighty and later 
frame of mind. 

I must say that I did not seek the Order 
merely in quest of odd entertainment. As 
I have stated in the chapter before this, 
I had experienced strange things—they 
still appear to me strange—of body, 
mind and spirit, and I supposed that the 
Order, dimly heard of, might give me 
some light and guidance and leading on 
these matters. But, as I have noted, I 
was mistaken; the Twilight Star shed no 
ray of any kind on my path. 


It was towards the end of 1900 that I 
perceived that as I had lost sight of the 
admirable Syon, so Bagdad was wearing 
badly enough. I have seen from the 
train the architecture of the ‘“White City” 
in these recent years. It was never any- 
thing at its best, assuredly; never any- 
thing save foolishness. Still, lit up on a 
summer night, with its extravagant towers 

218 


Things Near and Far 
and walls, pavilions and domes and min- 
arets, with all its fretted and fantastic 
work, with its still lakes and pouring 
waterfalls; in those old days before the 
war I have no doubt that it symbolised 
joy and enchantment to young and simple 
hearts. But afterwards, when long neg- 
lect had told upon it, when winter rains 
had wept upon its walls and soot showers 
had drifted on its pavilions, when the 
summer suns had scorched its whiteness, 
and black March winds had torn its 
feigned embroideries and false ornaments, 
when many autumn storms had beat upon 
its plaster battlements and the waterfalls 
were stilled and the lakes were become 
obscene pits of slime and rubbish—what 
an ugly mockery it stood there, an idiot’s 
city fallen into ruin, a scenic fairyland 
in evil days. So my Bagdad became like 
the ‘White City,” magic down at heel, 
its enchantments silly and clumsy tricks, 
its mystic architecture a shabby sham, its 
strange encounters, .meetings with people 
who turned out to be bores or worse than 
bores. You know the story of the fairy 
gold: at night the man who had had happy 
commerce with the People of the Hills 
219 


Things Near and Far 
found himself enriched with boundless and 
wonderful treasure; but in the morning 
the marvel of gold had all turned into a 
heap of dead leaves; such was my case. 

And here I am moved to wonder, as I 
often wonder, whether what we call “‘fairy 
tales’ do not in fact contain a curious 
wisdom and the secrets of very strange and 
mysterious psychology. Take this old 
tale of the fairy gold and its transmuta- 
tion into ugly rubbish, as an example. 
To most of us it is a tale and nothing 
more than a tale; without any reason, 
without any meaning, without any sort of 
sense or significance in it. We accept it 
just as a piece of picturesque fancy and 
nothing more; the turning of the magic 
gold into leaves was just a happy notion | 
of the unknown and remote individual — 
who made up the story. But suppose 
that there is something more than this: 
rather, something quite different from 
this. I am well aware, of course, of the 
various explanations of the fairy myth- 
ology; the fairies are the gods of the 
heathen come down in the world: Diana 
become Titania. Or the fairies are a 
fantasy on the small, dark people who 

220 


Things Near and Far 


dwelt in the land and under the land be- 
fore the coming of the Celts; or they are 
“elementals,” spirits of the four elements: 
there are all these accounts, and, for all 
I know, all may be true, each in its meas- 
ure. But is it possible that there is, now 
and then, a more hidden and interior 
sense in some of the tales of the fairy: 
land and the fairies? I am inclined to 
think that this may be so; that the stories 
may be—occasionally, not always by any 
means—the veils of certain rare interior 
experiences of mankind; experiences, I 
may say, which are best avoided. The 
gold faded into dead leaves; it may be 
more than an idle tale. At any rate, it 
was a very dismal disenchantment to me 
when I woke up and found that I was not 
the Commander of the Faithful, that the 
fair Circassian was, in fact, a native not 
of Circassia but of Clapham, that Bagdad 
was not Bagdad at all, but a London 
“Exhibition” fallen into very bad repair 
and urgently in need of tacks and white- 
wash. The Palace was not habitable; 
rain was coming in through cracks and 
rents in the marble that was plaster on 
the head of him who for a time had been 
221 


Things Near and Far 


Haroun Alraschid, who now began to 
suspect that his real style and tide was 
Silly Fool. And then I went on the stage, 
which is a world of illusion certainly but 
of a much less harmful illusion than that 
of plaster-Bagdad and fairy gold and 
the hall under the hill. 

I have wondered at times why there is 
no good novel of the stage. But a little 
consideration shews that there can be no 
such thing. George Moore wrote long 
ago a clever book called ‘‘A Mummer’s 
Wife.” It is a capital book, and I should — 
think a very faithful impression of a 
‘Cloches de Corneville’”’ touring company | 
in the early ’eighties. I would say of an 
individual ‘“Cloches de Corneville” com- 
pany, for the characters strike one as 
portraits of particular people; there is 
nothing of the universal about the book, 
nothing of the essence of the stage life. 
And it is probably impossible to write 
the real novel of the stage, for the good 
reason that the stage is not one but many. 
In the old days, in the days of the Crum- 
mles Company, it would have been easier. 
The actor of those days was supposed, till 
he had proved his supreme eminence in 

222 


Things Near and Far 


one particular line of business, to be cap- 
able of all. He was to play “Hamlet,” 
he was also to go on in the Farce, he was 
to dance a hornpipe between the acts, 
he was always to be ready with a song; 
and, again, unless he were a very emin- 
ent actor indeed, he very rarely associated 
with people beyond the range of the call- 
boy’s voice. The stage in those days was 
a world apart, and the men and women 
who trod it a race apart; the actor was 
a type, just as the sailor of Smollett’s 
day was a type. But all that is long 
over; it would be very difficult to find a 
general formula to cover the life of the 
stage to-day. Commodore’ Trunnion 
viewed all existence as a voyage on board 
one of His Mayjesty’s ships; and I knew 
a stage-manager who, playing skittles, 
avowed his determination to bring down 
“that O.P. skittle’’; but the Commodore 
is dead, and the stage-manager is dying. 
In fact I should say that the average 
actor of to-day is far from being gratified 
when he is recognised as an actor; rather 
he is inclined to be ashamed of his pro- 
fession. I remember that as I was talking 
to two stage friends on a London pave- 
223 


Things Near and Far 


ment an old man who was selling laces 
and studs and such matters in the gutter 
implored us to buy: “I was an actor 
once myself, gentlemen.” I perceived 
that my friends were very far from being 
pleased. I think that the poor old man 
would have done better if he had said: 
“IT was an officer in the Guards once my- 
self, gentlemen.”’ So, in brief, the actors 
are no longer the race apart of the old 
days; they mix with all sorts of people 
and have, naturally, become very much 
like all sorts of people. Some of them 
think that the change is for the better, 
others disagree. I venture no judgment 
save this: that they are certainly less pic- 
turesque, because less differenced than of 
old, and thus it is that nobody is likely 
to do much good with a story of the stage. 

I daresay that few people outside the 
profession are aware that the old players — 
had a language of their own, or rather a 
language which they shared with another 
and a widely different craft. Not merely 
the technical language of the stage, though 
that had its curiosities too. For example, — 
I once heard George Alexander at re- 
hearsal say to one of the company: ‘“Too 

224 


Things Near and Far 


much of the old, Smith, too much of the 
old!’ And Smith, though he had been 
for many years on the stage, told me after- 
wards that he had never heard the phrase 
before, and didn’t know what it meant. 
I knew what it meant, having associated, 
like Mr. Lillyvick, with members of the 
theatrical profession in the provincial, 
that is more or less, the less fortunate 
grade. ‘‘The old” means the melodra- 
matic style of acting, the manner which 
used to be associated with the name of 
Barry Sullivan. When an actor said, 
“TI gave them a bit of the old,” he meant 
that he exaggerated somewhat both in his 
tones and in the business of the scene; in 
other words, that he made it “big” and 
Ybroad.’’ 

But this is not the language I mean. 
Once on a provincial tour I found that 
the stage-manager had somehow heard 
of my connection with literature, and was 
inclined, in consequence, to suspect me a 
little of being, as we should say now, a 
““high-brow” and to resent the supposed 
fact. So I put him through an examina- 
tion. I asked if he knew what ‘‘omees”’ 
were, in particular as to the character 

225 


Things Near and Far 


signified by the phrase ‘‘omee of the 
carser. Then as to the idioms “nunty 
munjare”’ and “‘nunty dinnari” and so on. 
He broke down badly, but he put away 
his evil suspicions from that moment; he 
knew that if I had written books in my 
day I had turned over a new leaf and had 
become a reformed character: I knew the 
curious speech better than he did. It is 
barbarous Italian, and was the lingo of 
old-fashioned actors and thieves. 


226 


Chapter XI 


the stage at the age of thirty-nine. 

It is, of course, unpractical, since at 
that age a man is too old to learn the 
business properly; but it is a great enter- 
tainment. The change was so extreme. 
I had always lived a very quiet life. I 
had few friends, few acquaintances. My 
life was in reading books and in writing 
them. All my preoccupations were lit- 
erary. Every morning after breakfast 
I went over what I had written the night 
before, correcting here and there and 
everywhere, generally convinced that the 
passage which had pleased me so much 
as I wrote it was, after all, not magnifi- 
cent. I took the bulldog for a walk 
from 12 to I, and another half-hour walk 
in the afternoon. ‘Then two cups.of tea 
without milk or sugar at 4, and the rigour 
of the literary game till 7, and again 
after dinner till 11. It was a life of rou- 

227) 


|: is a very odd experience to go on 


Things Near and Far 


tine, and all its adventures, difficulties, 
defeats and rare triumphs were those 
of the written page. I did not know a 
single actor, and had no curiosity as to the 
actor’s life, circumstances, customs or 
manners. And then, one afternoon in 
February, 1901, I found myself stuck up 
with a number of ladies and gentlemen 
on a thing like a greenhouse flower-pot 
stand, and we were all required to express 
suitable and varied emotions as Shylock 
appealed for the fulfilment of the bond 
which Antonio had given him. ‘This was 
the first thing I had tried to do on the 
stage, and I believe it was the most dif- 
ficult. No doubt Mr.—afterwards Sir 
F'rank—Benson was right in saying that 
it was the only way to learn how to act; 
but gesture, facial expression, pantomine, 
the knack of knowing how to be individ- 
ual and yet to join in effectively with 
the crowd; all these things are extremely 
dificult, very much more difficult than the 
art of speaking an effective line effectively. 

But—very likely because the change 
from my former way of living was so 
tremendous in every respect—I found the 
life an enchanting one. Of course I could 

228 


Things Near and Far 


not have begun under happier auspices; 
nay, I could not have begun under any 
auspices half so happy. It has been said, 
I think, more than once, and said by men 
far more qualified to speak than I, that 
if it had not been for the Benson Com- 
pany, acting as an ordered art, with its 
technique and tradition, would pretty well 
have perished out of England. ‘The old 
stock companies were gone, with their 
manifold opportunities for learning the 
actor’s craft. The young man who went 
on the stage probably walked on for six 
months or a year in a London produc- 
tion, and unless he were an exceptionally 
bright young fellow he learned very little. 
Perhaps, if he were lucky, he was pro- 
moted from a thinking part to a speak- 
ing one and uttered the line: “You don’t 
say so!’ every night; but still he learned 
very little. If he became a good actor 
under this régime, it was a case of genius 
triumphing over circumstance. Of course 
good actors come from everywhere: from 
the academies, from melodramas travel- 
ling in the fit-ups, from the chorus of the 
musical play, from the ranks of the 
walkers-on in the long London run; but, 
229 


Things Near and Far 


as I say, these are cases of greatness 
overcoming difficulties. But under the 
training provided by the Benson Company 
it was a man’s fault if he did not learn 
to act; it was pretty definite proof that 
there was no acting in his composition. I| 
remember Henry Ainley saying in this 
very year, 1901: ‘“‘Well, in the last fort- 
night I have played twelve different parts, 
and if that won’t teach a man how to act, 
nothing will.” This, I may say, was at 
the end of the Festival Season at Strat- 
ford-on-Avon, a strenuous and a delight- 
ful time. 

But, as I say, I could have entered on 
the boards under no happier auspices. 
There was a constant succession of small 
parts, so graded with due tenderness both 
to the beginner and the audience that not 
much harm could be done by uneasy awk- 
wardness, and much good was certain to 
be gained by the beginner. For example, 
I have a suspicion that the whole pack of 
us on that flower-pot stand in ‘The Mer- 
chant,” all of us beginners, were about 
as bad as bad can be; but it really signified 
little. ‘he people in front were looking 
at Shylock and Portia, not at us; and I 

230 


Things Near and Far 


don’t suppose that our incapacity dl- 
minished to any calculable extent the pub- 
lic entertainment. Then in the next piece, 
““As You,’ I was a Forest Lord with a 
line. I had to say to the Banished Duke: 
“Tl bring you to him straight,” and 
Oscar Asche took pains to show me that 
I must speak it as I moved up stage with 
my back to the audience; but the fortunes 
of the play hardly depended on that line, 
while I was beginning to grow a slight 
seed_of confidence. ~ 

And how all this was an utterly dif- 
ferent world from anything that I had 
ever conjectured; I ‘cannot express the 
gulf that yawned between the old and the 
new. In the former years I struggled 
with words and phrases and sentences and 
shades of meaning implied by them: now 
I strove to understand how something like 
an attenuated pigtail could become a 
highly probable fifteenth-century beard 
and moustaches in a couple of minutes, 
when skilled hands were laid upon it. 
And I was occupied with R.U.E. and 
L.U.E. and 5 and 8, and how to stand so 
that you command the stage as F.R.B. 
instructed me, and the endeavour to take 

231 


Things Near and Far 


in and profit by the kindly tips and hints 
and cautions given by the elder members 
of the company: here was a holiday, in- © 
deed, for a man who had tried to tear the 
secret of literature from the thorn castle — 
where it is concealed, who had torn his 
hands and his heart sadly enough in the © 
endeavour. 

I have mentioned the tips and hints of 
the Elder Brethren amongst the Benson- 
ians. This was a great part of the dis- 
cipline and instruction of the course. It 
was not only what Benson said at rehear- 
sal, it was also what Asche or Rodney or 
Brydone or Swete said after the rehear- 
sal or after the show, and often what — 
they said was, quite rightly, highly uncom- 
plimentary. I remember when Henry ~ 
Herbert—“‘starring”’ in America now, I — 
believe—was playing in “King John,” it 
fell to him to pronounce the lines which 
speak of painting the lily and gilding re- 
fined gold. He spoke them, as I thought, — 
with great spirit; but Brydone—dead not 
long ago—took him apart afterwards and 
talked to him for half an hour or more — 
as to the grave mistake he had committed. 

‘You spoke the lines as if they were 

232 


Things Near and Far 


beautiful poetry,” said Brydone, ‘‘and, in- 


deed, they are. If you had been reciting 
them your reading would have been quite 
right; but not in the scene, on the stage. 
So-and-so—I have forgotten the name of 
the part—is raging against King John; 
he isn’t thinking of the poetic beauty of | 
the words he is using.” 

Now, I do not presume to judge 
whether Brydone were right or wrong in 
this criticism; such matters are too high 
for my small experience as an actor; but 
consider the enormous value to the begin- 
ner of living in such an atmosphere of 
thought and observation and considera- 
tion of the things of the theatre. MHer- 
bert may have come eventually to the con- 
clusion that he had been right after all, and 
that Brydone was wrong; but, anyhow, he 
had worried the question out and weighed 
it in his mind, and looked at it and around 
it; and all that, it seems to me, is the very 
air in which good craftsmanship is born 
and nurtured and grows great and flour- 
ishes. 

And so, apart from these after-confab- 
ulations and dressing-room counsels, a re- 
hearsal in the Benson Company has 


Fe, 


Things Near and Far 


always struck me as a liberal education in 
the player’s art. Benson himself—the 
“Pa” of the affectionate and reverent re- 
membrance of many hundreds of his 
grateful sons and scholars—has always 
been an imaginative poet of a high order 
—only somehow he has never written any 
poetry. Instead, he has produced Shake- 
speare, and perhaps he has chosen the 
better way. He has illuminated his text 
admirably, and his way was not to come 
down to the theatre with the whole 
scheme of things cut and dried in his head, 
with every intonation, every bit of busi- 
ness and every position settled immutably 
beforehand, but rather to approach the 
play, scene by scene, with a liberal and 
open spirit. The main conception he 
doubtless brought with him, but any light 
he could find in the process of rehearsal 
he would welcome heartily, no matter 
whether it came from one of the elder 
brethren or from the newest member of 
the company. For example, during the 
rehearsals of “King John” we had come 
to the scene wherein the Legate, Pan- 
dulph, reconciles the King to Holy Church. 
I was talking to the Legate at the wings 


234 


Things Near and Far 


during some brief interval, and ventured 
very tentatively to describe the symbol- 
ical embrace known as the Kiss of Peace 
as a possibly effective bit of business in 
the reconciliation scene. The Legate, 
interested, asked me to show him how it 
was done, and we went through the busi- 
ness. But Benson, who seemed to be con- 
sidering other matters down stage, had 
noticed what we were about, and he called 
out: “I like that: we'll do it.” And done 
it was; and I had been a little over two 
months in the company and on the stage! 

And another instance, taken from the 
same play, of a Bensonian rehearsal of 
those days. The scene was the discovery 
of the dead body of Prince Arthur. I 
had to say: 


“What would’st thou do, renowned Faucon- 
bridge, 
Succour a villain and a murderer?” 


Whereon Hubert furiously interposed: 
“Lord Essex, I am none!” 


And then I had to draw the cloak away 
from the corpse and exclaim: 
“Who killed this Prince?” 
235 


Things Near and Far 


And thereupon a debate arose. Should — 


the words be spoken before the removal 
of the cloak? Should the cloak be re- 


moved before the uttering of the line? 


Should word and action be simultaneous? — 


The point was discussed with the utmost 
earnestness, as a matter of vital import- 


ance, and I, feeling that I was in mighty — 
deep waters, suggested in all humility that — 


I should speak the words with an indica- 


tive gesture and that Hubert should step — 


forward, appalled, and remove the cloak 


and discover the body of the Prince. — 


But this started another subsidiary de-— 


bate, and the rehearsal breaking off at this 


point, Brydone (Hubert) and Frank 


Rodney (Fauconbridge) were left on the 
Stratford stage, walking up and down, © 
and wondering, in muttered undertones, 


> 


whether it would be within the limits of - 
possibility and stage propriety for Hubert © 


to snatch that cloak away. Their faces — 
were grave, earnest and perplexed. Out-_ 
side in the sunshine by the Avon I en-— 


countered ‘‘Pa.’’ He looked at me with 


a certain waggishness in his eye, as if he 
suspected bewilderment on my part, and — 


said: 


236 


ee OO EEE oo oeSOVoVvOOOOeOeOeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEeEeEeEeEeEeeeeEeeeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeRewn ee eeeeEEEEeEeEeEeEeEeEeeeeEEeEeEeEeEeeeeeeeEeEeEe————————ee 


Things Near and Far 
“Well, Mr. Machen, what do you think 


about it yourself ?””’ 
Balodecd, sir) | replied, ‘“T don’t ven- 
ture to have any opinion.” 

And I meant what I said, for I aide 
think then, and I don’t think now, that 
it befits the entered apprentice to express 
his opinion, or presume to have any opin- 
ion, in the presence of past masters. 

Now it may be thought that I am “‘guy- 
ing’ the Company methods in this matter 
of Prince Arthur’s funeral cloak. I am 
not doing anything of the sort. I only 
wish I had gone on in the craft, and were 
now myself entitled to walk up and down 
the stage, debating just such a point. 
The matter in itself was, no doubt, small 
enough: a stage-management in a hurry 


would have given a ruling and the scene 


would have proceeded; but under a stage- 
management in a hurry what would have 


become of the vivid interest taken in the 


smallest circumstance of the play by the 
whole company, from F. R. Benson down- 
ward? 

And, by the way, I trust I am not giv- 


ing the impression that the Bensonians of 
that day were a body of solemn pedants? 


237 


Things Near and Far 


I have not yet forgotten my admiration, 
my almost awestruck admiration, at see- 
ing the manner in which the man who was 
to play King John drank home-brewed 
ale in a triangular parlour of the Wind- 
mill on the afternoon before the produc- 
tion. He drank in the manner of the 
ancient heroes, and he gave a very good 
performance at night. 

But the Stratford Festival drew to its 
close. On the last Saturday we were re- 
hearsing in the morning, playing in the 
afternoon and playing again in the even- 
ing. Some time in the course of the day 
I was told that I was to play Nym in the 
‘Merry Wives’ on Monday night at 
Worcester. I bought the play and looked — 
at the part and got the cuts from the 
Prompt Book—and I wonder why I didn’t 
drown myself in the Avon after the show — 
as the easiest way out of the difficulty; 
and if anyone wants to know why, let 
him read the part of Nym in “The Merry 
Wives of Windsor,” and ask himself how 
he would like to learn that queer gibber- 
ish and learn how to play it in a couple of 
days, he having had three months’ expe- 
rience of the stage. But instead of 


238 


Things Near and Far 


drowning myself in the Avon, I. . . re- 
freshed myself at a famous tavern of the 
town together with about half the com- 
pany; and I think we heard the chimes at 
two o'clock in the morning, and it was 
reported that old George Weir, on being 
asked ‘“‘to write something’? in the 
hostess’s book had written the words: 
‘When my cue comes call me and I will 
answeir.”’ 

And_that reminds me: At the Benson- 
ian dinner in the year in which this great 
actor, George Weir, died, F. R. Ben- 
son began his speech. His manner com- 
manded the cessation of applause, and he 
raised one hand, and held it high, and 
said: 

‘This year, one amongst us has an- 


-swered the summons of the call-boy of 
the stars.” 


But to return to my small business. 


_On the Sunday we travelled to Worcester, 


and I spent the rest of the day in a des- 


perate struggle with Nym and “the hu- 


-mour of bread and cheese,” and “that’s 
the humour of it,” in endeavouring to get 


into my memory phrases which are not 


239 


Things Near and Far 


merely old but old-fashioned, for Nym, 
like ‘Touchstone, discourses for the most 
part Elizabethan catchwords which, three 
hundred years before, were “certain of 
a laugh,’’ which the process of time 
and fashion has made meaningless, and 
phrases such as these are very difficult to” 
learn. 

But I learned them somehow or other 
on the Sunday, and the next morning came 
to the one and only rehearsal. It was 
not on the stage, more important things 
were happening there, but in the travel-_ 
lers’ samples room of one of the Wor- 
cester inns. Of course there was no 
scenery, no costumes, no “props” of any 
kind. A few chairs indicated the set, 
quite sufficiently, I may say to a man of 
experience, but dubiously enough to a man 
of next to no experience. ‘Thus, when 
it came to my last exit, the Assistant 
Stage-Manager gave his instructions some- 
what as follows: 

‘‘After you have said the last words to 
Page, turn round and go up the flight of 
steps L.C., here, between these chairs. 
When you have got to the top, turn again 
and say to Page, over his shoulder: ‘My 

240 


Things Near and Far 


name is Nym, and Falstaff loves your 
wife.’ Then exit Left along the terrace.” 

Simplicity itself, to an actor, but some- 
what horrifying to a beginner. And then 
two or three of the principals were not 
there—they were rehearsing other scenes, 
very likely, on the stage, and the Prompt- 
ers: ‘‘Mr. Rodney will come on on that 
cue from the right upper entrance, where 
that table is, and you go up to him and 
meet him Centre and say so and so, and 
then he speaks the line so and so and you 
cross to the Right’’—with much more to 
the same effect. And my breath was 
queer and catchy, even though it was only 
the rehearsal, and I wondered what my 
voice and I would be like at night! 

Well, I was paralysed with stage-fright. 
But I got through, somehow; and I hope 
the Old Woman of the Company, Miss 
'Denvil, as admirable an actress as George 
Weir was an actor, meant what she said 
after I had made my Exit Left along the 
terrace. She smacked me heartily on the 
back, and said: 

‘There! I always say the nervous ones 
are the best!” 

So the tour went on, and in the course 


241 


Things Near and Far 


of it I received an odd bit of promotion. 
I descended from the flower-pot stand in 
the Trial Scene of the “Merchant” and 
became the Clerk of the Court. I think 
he speaks one line and reads a letter, and 
that is all. It is hardly to be called a 
part; if the man who had to do it failed 
at the last moment the Business Manager 
or, more likely, his assistant, would be 
summoned and robed in the black habit 
and the square cap. He would be told 
the line and given the letter, and that 
would be all right. It was so small a 
thing that the man who “played” it was 
supposed not to care to do so under his 
own name, so I was either not in the bill 
at all or else I appeared as ‘““Mr. Walter 
Plinge,” the Mrs. Harris of the Benson 
Company who often came in useful on 
occasions like this, or when there was a 
case of “doubling.” There was such a 
person, but I believe he kept a tavern 
frequented by the Company. 

And so I was the Clerk of the Court, 
and solemnly proceeded to consider within 
myself what a Compleat Clerk of the 
Court should be like. I determined, 
firstly, that the boy at the back of the gal- 

242 


Things Near and Far 


lery should hear what I said; but this is a 
general rule—and by no means the least 
important—which applies to all acting. 
My second resolution was that a really 
convincing Clerk would not take the faint- 
est interest in the very emotional proce- 
dure which seems to have characterised the 
strict court of Venice. He would listen 
to all the pleadings and all the agonies 
with a stolid countenance. When the 
Doge spoke of “brassy bosoms” and 
“hearts of flint” and “gentle answer, 
Jew” and so forth, the Clerk would be- 
come stonier and stonier in his indifter- 
ence, possibly reflecting inwardly that he 
had always thought that the appointment 
was a purely political one, and that now 
he was sure of it. “Ad captandum ar- 
guments,”’ “Old Bailey rhetoric,” ‘Buz- 
fuz on the Bench,” ‘‘Trying to throw dust 
in the eyes of the Jew,’ such phrases, 
translated, of course, into choice Vene- 
tian dialect, might be supposed to flick 
through the purely legal and formalistic 
mind of the Clerk. As for the young ad- 
vocate, whose credentials the Clerk had 
been obliged to proclaim, well, frankly, 
the Clerk could not understand how the 


243 


Things Near and Far 


Doge, politician as he was, could permit 
such unprofessional rubbish as the ‘‘Qual- 
ity of mercy’ speech to be uttered in 
court at all. ‘Mountain pines,” “wag 
their high tops,” ‘‘twice blest,” ‘‘crowned — 
monarch better than his throne’’: really, 
really! What was the Bar coming to? 
The Clerk’s face and attitude have be- 
come perfectly stony in their supreme in- 
difference; he might be a thousand miles 
away. 

But! What is that? The Bond bad 
in law? The plaintiff debarred from re- 
covering, and not only that, but, ipso 
facto, liable to criminal proceedings of a — 
highly penal character? Now, indeed, 
the’ Clerk: of \the Court is interested 
Not that he cares twopence for Antonio 
or for Shylock either; but there does seem 
distinctly to be a flaw. The young Advo- 
cate must have a technical mind, that 
greatest of all blessings. The Clerk 
pricks up his ears, as if he were a terrier 
advised of the presence of a rat; he is 
intensely awake; he consults his author- 
ities on the table before him; he is really 
inclined to think that a highly important 
point is at issue; he believes that the ques- 


244 


Things Near and Far 


tion, or something very much like it, was 
raised in the Dogeship of Bragadin, c. 
1150. At length the Clerk of the Court 
is all alive. 

I thought of all that, and I tried to 
render it as best I could. And I only 
mention this trivial nonsense because, to 
the best of my belief, it is the only instance 
in which I have found that doing my best 
and sparing no pains brought me the 
faintest sort of reward. Asa rule, in my 
experience, the mere fact of taking pains 
has been rewarded with the malignity of 
scoundrels and the insolence of fools. 

But in this extraordinary and, as I 
must say, miraculous affair it was other- 
wise. The tour of the Benson Company 
drew to its close. It was now hot sum- 
mer and we were playing a matinée, I 
think on the Whitsuntide Bank Holiday, 
in some theatre on the south side of 
the river; some theatre which in all prob- 
ability is now devoted to “the pictures.” 
It was glorious weather, there were few 
people in the house, and as one of the 
ladies of the company observed cheerfully 
in the wings, ‘‘People who come to see 
Shakespeare on an afternoon like this 


245 


Things Near and Far 
ought to have their noses rubbed in it.” | 
Ah, the good, gross gaiety: how few 
people have as this lady had, and has, the 
true art of it! Her remark did me a lot 
of good that languid, heated afternoon 
in the half-empty theatre; and I believe 
that the Clerk of the Court—we were 
playing the “Merchant’’-—was a shade 
wearier than usual in his utter boredom 
and contempt of the whole proceedings: 
till his moment came. 

And a few days later Henry Ainley was 
saying to me in our dressing-room: “I am 
engaged by Alexander to play Paolo next 
year. And, do you know, Alexander said 
to me: ‘You've got a remarkably good 
actor in your Company; and I couldn't 
even find his name in the cast. He was 
playing the Clerk of the Court that after- 
noon: he was very good indeed.’ ” 

The great George Alexander to speak 
thus of the little beginner in his little 
shadow of a part! Well, I suppose all 
such taps are vanities; but there was a 
very happy man that night in the dress- 
ing-room, and he plied the spirit-gum — 
and fixed on his beard for the part of the 
Major-Domo in the ‘“‘Shrew’’—two lines 

246 


Things Near and Far 


—with trembling, unsteady, rapturous 
fingers. 

A. few weeks later I was engaged to 
play a small part in “Paolo and Fran- 
cesca,’’ but that was for the early spring 
of 1902, and I had to fillin. So I joined 
a pastoral or open-air company (almost 
all of whom were Bensonians), and played 
with them for three weeks. Then I met 
a friend in the Strand and said “I want a 
shop,” and found myself rehearsing next 
day the part of a comic Irish servant in 
a sketch called ‘“‘The Just Punishment’’— 
an entirely preposterous playlet. We did 
a fortnight of it—two houses a night— 
at the Hoxton Varieties and another 
East-End hall, the name of which I have 
forgotten. At the Varieties I dressed 
with a very pleasant black man; the rats 
ran about the dressing-rooms and pas- 
sages like kittens. And the audience! 
There was no question of their being all 
right till you began to bore them. You 
made your entrance as the curtain went 
up, and found the whole house in an up- 
roar. Most of it was light-hearted hi- 
larity, some of it was argument, and they 
argue very forcibly in Hoxton, occasion- 


247 


Things Near and Far 


ally with broken bottles. The actor's 
business was to drown them, and get them 
to listen, and amuse them—if he could 
—and very capital training it was. But 
the sketch was not booked on—and no 
wonder—so I went to Mr. Denton’s in 
Maiden Lane. He sent me to Mr. 
Charles Terry, who was taking out a mel- 
odrama called ‘‘The Silent Vengeance,” 
written by Mr. Harry Grattan round the 
personality of Mr. Silward, that wonder- 
ful animal impersonator. From first to 
last I played three parts in ‘“The Silent 
Vengeance’’—a solicitor, a doctor and a 
barber—and it only ran six weeks. But 
for the last week of the run I had been 
rehearsing the part of an old actor in 
the farcical comedy of “The Varsity 
Belle.” Then at the end of a fortnight, 
for one reason or another, I had to 
change this role for that of a University 
Don; and there were over two hundred 
cues in the first act, and I had only a week 
for study! The manager was an entirely 
honest but boorish fellow, and I gave him 
my notice; “bunged in my notice’ would 
be more idiomatic. The day I left ‘“The 
Varsity Belle” company I got an engage- 
248 


Things Near and Far 


ment from an old Bensonian friend to play 
for a fortnight or so in Old Comedy down 
in the forgotten country, and a delightful 
engagement it turned out. We all knew 
each other, or very soon got to know each 
other, and we drank beer and played 
skittles in tumbledown alleys behind old 
inns, and brewed bowls of punch, and in 
spite of these wild practices acted, I think, 
decently. Poor Ernest Cosham was the 
Comedian and Mr. Leon Quartermaine 
played the juvenile leads; and I hope he 
has not forgotten a famous game of Blind 
‘Hookey in a little inn at Westbury-on- 
Avon, the only card game that I ever en- 
joyed. And the morning after our last 
performance I went from Andover to 
town and listened to Stephen Phillips 
reading his play, ‘‘Paolo and Francesca,” 
to the assembled company. I had been 
a year on the stage, and I think I had had 
as varied an experience as falls to the lot 
of most beginners. 


And here there is a great gap. There 
were other adventures on the stage; but 
enough, I think, has been said of these 
things. I have just told of that happy 


249 


Things Near and Far 


moment of June, 1901, when Henry Ain- 
ley repeated to me George Alexander’s 
kindly praise of my acting. And, indeed, 
that was bliss, but I believe that I received 
the promise of a happiness that should be 
deeper and more lasting one morning 
towards the end of August, 1921. For 
that morning brought a letter ending my 
career as a journalist. 


Poor George Sampson got into griev- 
ous trouble over his innocent speculations 
as to so innocent a thing as an under-petti- 
coat. I propose, therefore, to say noth- 
ing about the craft of journalism, which I 
followed for many years. 

Save only this: Eduxit me de lacu mis- 
eri@, et de luto faecis. Et statuit super 
petram pedes meos: et direxit gressus 
meos. 


THE END 


250 


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